what is most effective way of tracking couples in contacts?

[Guest]

I work with couples. To manage couples in Outlook 2003 Contacts is it
preferable to create separate contact records for each or is there a better
way of entering their contact data?

 

[Vince Averello [MVP-Outlook]]

I group families by using the Company Name field. That way you can group by
company and see the people belonging to that unit/pairing/etc.

 

[Guest]

Thanks
Good idea..I'll give it a try.
Mr. Perfect

 

[ProfDD]

Vince:

What do you do with their actual employers' names, then ?

I've experimented with using the "Contacts" field to link folks in the
same family or sharing an e-mail address or residence. Not
satisfactory because different things may be being shared. Logical
correctness would require a User Field, but, in practice, the
data-entry discipline seems to hard even for a single user.

One thing for sure, the spouse field seems to be a poor tool for the
job in most cases. One might as well just put the spouse's name in the
notes field with a tag.

 

[Guest]

Hi, I'm playing with this as well as sometimes it's appropriate to send
stuff to a couple / family whereas other times it's more appropriate to
contact individuals. It's all a bit complicated so we're definately having
one record per person.

In terms of linking them, however, the "contacts" field is rather limited
(as it doesn't define relationship at all) and there doesn't seem to be a
"contact" type of field in the custom options (doh! as obvious solution would
be to make a custom form and stick "spouse", "siblings" etc on it if the
field type would allow an actual link to the other contact/s).

So anyway, the route I'm moving towards is creating a separate contacts
folder with families in it and linking all the members of the family to that.
It's all a bit cumbersome but hopefully I'll be able to figure some of this
scripting stuff out to help.

If anyone has better idea, I'm all ears!
Sam