Earlier this week I searched the net for contact-related standards work and found the W3C work in progress on a Contacts API which defines the high-level interfaces required to obtain read access to a user’s unified address book [ http://w3c-test.org/dap/contacts/ ]. This defines a number of fields and attributes. I was unable to find anything relevant on the Dublin Core website or the ISO website.

From this initial search I conclude that a) there is unlikely to be any standard definition of all the fields I want in my address book, b) I am likely to continue to need to maintain an offline separate address book if I want to maintain special fields, c) it will probably be worthwhile trying to use terms that are standardised by W3C and/or ISO, and d) I should think carefully about what my real needs are before spending a lot of effort on upgrading my offline Filemaker address book which is custom built and is expensive to keep pace with Filemaker upgrades.

The particularly useful facilities of my Filemaker application are: 1) The ability to print a hardcopy address book, 2) The ability to manage who gets sent an Xmas card and to record who we received one from, on a year by year basis, 3) The ability to automatically search for an address, 4) The ability to print address labels, 5) The storage of addresses by family as opposed to just by individual. After thinking about this for a while it seems that all these could be achieved using Excel – though the printing of the address labels might be a bit fiddly. However, just to cover all bases I searched the net for low cost address book applications and found StatTrak which seems to possess many of the facilities I require at $29.95.

The synching, export and import facilities possessed by the iPhone, Yahoo Mail, Filemaker and StaTrak are in the table below:

If you have a contact list in your email system and another in your mobile phone, you’ll be aware  of the desirability of keeping both lists in synch. However, if you also have an address book with some additional non-standard fields on your PC, the problem is even greater. Ideally it would be best to have just one address book – but mail and phone systems aren’t generally set up to do that, let alone being capable of including non-standard fields. So, the challenge is how to keep all the information you need in sync across these multiple systems with the least effort and keeping errors to a minimum.

My particular circumstances are that I have an email account with BT Yahoo, an iPhone, and a PC-based address book in a Filemaker database. The iPhone seems able to draw contact details from BT Yahoo, but BT Yahoo doesn’t seem to be able to do the reverse. Neither Yahoo nor the iPhone allow non-standard fields to be created so I can’t just ditch the Filemaker database.

I’m thinking of exploring a number of avenues. One is the use of the export and import facilities across all three systems. Another is the possibility that there may be an official standard for contact list fields and integration facilities. And another is the use of macros in Filemaker to try and automate the synching process. If you’ve got any experience or ideas on the subject please reply to this post or drop me an email.