Contact Management Software We all live in the digital age. The 21st century can be truly called the digital era. Computers have become an integral part of our daily lives and technology is our constant companion. The tremendous advancements made in digital technology in the recent decades, along with the unprecedented affordability and wide availability of personal computers, have contributed to the dawning of a true digital era around the globe. The paper is fast becoming obsolete and writing instruments like pen and pencils will become fewer and fewer. Our diaries have gone electronic (blogs), we prefer using word processors, notebooks don’t mean the same thing anymore and our correspondence is seriously electronic these days (emails). We work on our computers at work and can hardly think of a day devoid of the familiar caress of the mouse and the keyboard on our fingertips. From our office files to the photos of our friends to our music and videos – all have found their way into our computers. Opinions vary on the impact of computers on human lives. Some cynics are of the opinion that computers, especially the Internet, have isolated us from each other. We’d rather spend our time browsing on the Internet or playing games on them or simply working than spending time in the company of others. Others hold a different opinion. Man is basically a social animal and feels a constant urge to communicate with others of his kind. This partly explains the popularity of all the social media websites. Millions reach out to each other through these websites, making new friends and discovering new faces every day. It’s no wonder that the list of contacts in our lives is expanding at an alarming rate. The need for a contact management software has never been felt more strongly than now. The sheer number of contacts that an average teenager maintains today could easily fill up half-a-dozen notebooks. Even for the global businessman, maintaining the list of contacts can be a daunting task sometimes. It was a lot simpler earlier when people had just postal addresses, one for the residence and another for work. These days, people have website addresses, email addresses, IM (Instant Messenger) IDs, cell phone numbers, fax numbers and so much more. If you are required to remember so many things about one single person, just think what you would do with hundreds of them? A contact management software easily takes care of such a problem. It neatly organizes all your contacts in such useful groups as Friends, Work, Acquaintances, Relatives and so on. Such a piece of software is usually capable of storing virtually limitless data and number of contacts. The best thing is that it indexes the names automatically so that finding a specific name from a long list of contacts is never a problem. You can search for names by their first names, last names, phone numbers, addresses and so on. Each contact is provided with a fresh new page where you can key in all the available details. If a piece of address gets changed or a new number is added, it’s a cinch to make the requisite changes in the entries. There are some very smart contact management software available in the market today. All you have to do is choose one and install it on your computer. It can automatically import all your contacts from your email client (such as Outlook or Eudora), even your Internet mails (Yahoo! Mail or Gmail or Hotmail). Some would even let you store pictures, just to give a face to the name, as they say. Talking of such popular email client software as Outlook, it is worth mentioning that they often come with an integrated contact management software. It monitors all the email addresses that you correspond with, whether it be receiving mails or sending them, and prompts you to save any new name that it encounters. There are also some very good contact management software services available on the Internet. The best thing about using an online service is that it doesn’t tie you down to just one computer. You can access your list of contacts from just about any computer anywhere, as long as it has an Internet connectivity. Contact management software, other than simplifying the task of remembering the contact details of all the people we know, also offer a host of other advantages. When you have a mail to send to a number of people, just check their names in your contact management software, and it will send the mail to all the selected recipients. In spite of all its glory, remember that a contact management software is after all a computer program, and like all other computer programs can crash, get corrupted or simply refuse to work like it should. Do keep a backup of all your contacts, especially a written backup. It will save you a lot of despair should the program crash and cause all the stored data to get lost. A contact management software is more of a necessity than just a fancy accessory. As the list of contacts in our lives expands, its importance will also grow.