Open Contacts is an advanced contacts manager filled with innovating features. It allows you to manage individuals and companies separately. You can devise as many categories as you like to sort out all your contacts. One of Open Contacts' most interesting new features is the possibility to create “associations” between your contacts. You can associate John and Jane by marriage, or James and Company Inc. by work place. This means you are able to jump from one item to another by their real world connections. Open Contacts is also very flexible, as you can add as many new types of information as you like (personal email, party email, new phone number, old phone number, etc.) and organize those in different sections. You can synchronize your contacts with other media, and you can adjust different “actions” to be implemented based on the type of information (phone through Skype, see address in Google Maps, etc.).
The downside of all these ingenious features is the user interface, which is, to say the least, somewhat clumsy. Any new category has to be created in a special menu and is always named something like “new category 000454”. You need to rename it afterwards. All the associations are in another tab. So you will have, for instance, someone's name and address in one tab, but their workplace in another.
The name Open derives from Fonlow IT option to allow every user to exchange data to another program without having to retype every contact’s information. This is done thanks to the multiple options of importing and exporting your database (open in the sense that the database is not kept in a secret, closed file format). Nevertheless, exporting data from Open Contacts is not for everyone. If you happen to explore the potential of the program, creating new data fields, you will have to remember all of them in order to create a template to export your data.
In conclusion, if you really want the advanced features of Open Contacts (rare or even non-existing in other contact managers) you will have to cope with a lot of tedious tasks and advanced configurations. If you just want to keep all your contacts straight, this is not your best choice.
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