Here is the third edition of our Weekly Office 2.0 Roundup. Today, we will review 4 contact management applications, from Big Contacts to Xing. We will identify some unique features that might help your own selection process, and you will get a chance to cast your vote for the best online contact management application.

With the help of many contributors, we completed the Contacts section of the Office 2.0 Database. From the 4 players we identified, 2 are pure contact management applications (Big Contacts and Plaxo), while the other 2 are best described as professional networking platforms (LinkedIn and Xing, formerly known as OpenBC). Surprinsingly, contact management is something that everybody needs, but for which very few online alternatives are available. Microsoft Outlook is deeply entrenched in this market, and your address book is certainly one of the last pieces of information you would like to lose, making the transition to any online alternative all the more difficult.

Functionality
From a functionality standpoint, the pure contact managers differ significantly from the professional networking platforms. The former are essentially trying to replicate the features offered by Microsoft Outlook or Mac OS Address Book, while the later are designed as complements to Microsoft Outlook. In the pure contact manager category, Big Contacts takes some pages from the CRM playbook and adds task management to the mix, while Plaxo provides advanced synchronization with Microsoft Outlook. In the professional networking platform category, LinkedIn focuses—for the time being—on the tasks of finding a job or fulfilling a position, while Xing has slowly but surely morphed into a full fledged group management system. The offerings are so diverse that one has to wonder whether the best option would not be for Big Contacts to be acquired by Plaxo, and for LinkedIn to merge with Xing, then to use Big Plaxo alongside LinXing.

Ease of Migration
Initially, migrating from an offline address book to an online contact manager such as Big Contacts or Plaxo is pretty easy. All you have to do is export your contacts as a CSV file, or install a plug-in to Microsoft Outlook, and let it do the synchronization for you. Down the road, some unforeseen problems might appear if you were using a heavily customized version of Microsoft Outlook though. For example, synchronization with a mobile device might not be possible anymore, or might require that you keep using Microsoft Outlook as synchronization middleware in combination with ActiveSync. Similarly, if you used the Salesforce.com plug-in for Microsoft Outlook, you will lose the benefits of tight integration with your CRM system, which many sales people could not live without today. Ultimately, I believe that contact management in not a single feature, and should rather be provided by a larger platform, such as a CRM system, or an email client.

Price
All four solutions we reviewed for this article offer free versions as well as commercial upgrades, with monthly prices ranging from $4 to $200. Many users seem to be willing to pay for the extra functionality, as illustrated by Xing’s recent IPO or LinkedIn’s latest round of venture capital. This is good news, for it means that most players should remain around for the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, I would expect some consolidation to take place, and it should be noted that neither Google nor Yahoo! have any good solution for contact management nor professional networking.

Alternatives
There are many places where you can store your contacts, but few that are really worth considering. On one hand of the spectrum, most Web-based email clients come with a primitive address book, but as soon as you get hundreds of contacts and want to record more than an email address and a phone number, you quickly feel the need for something a little bit more powerful. On the other end of the spectrum, you could view a CRM solution such as Salesforce.com as a glorified contact manager, and you would certainly not be the first to make such an analogy. While CRM does a lot more than just contact management, it does a pretty phenomenal job at it, and more and more users are starting to use free offerings such as Free CRM or Zoho CRM for this very purpose.

Top Players
Several contact management applications do make use of HTTPS, therefore the Alexa ranking is not as reliable as we would like it to be. Nevertheless, and according to this ranking, we can extrapolate a tentative ranking for the players in the space. Google PageRank goes from 4 for the newly-released Big Contacts, to 7 for LinkedIn and Plaxo, somehow corroborating the ranking.

Quick Reviews
There are only 4 applications in our database, so all of them got a review.

Big Contacts: This is the very latest entrant in the space. The best way to think of Big Contacts is as a mini CRM system in disguise. Beside allowing you to manage your contacts with as much information as you would like, it also provides fairly advanced task management capabilities that are nicely integrated with the core contact manager. It allows you to add objects to contacts, such as tasks, notes, meetings, files, photos, etc. It also provides a complete team calendar, as well as an history of your interactions with any contact. Essentially, what you get with Big Contacts is similar to what the Contacts, Activities, and Calendar views of SugarCRM give you. Granted, it’s not as extensible, but if it’s all you need, it should do the job fairly well.

LinkedIn: This one defined the space for professional networking early on, then was copied and improved upon by OpenBC, later renamed Xing. It grew to a high-quality network rich of 9 million users, and should cross the bar of 10 million sometime in Q1 or early Q2 this year. Problem is, it’s not very sticky, in the sense that it does not provide any incentive for users to login on a regular basis, like they would with Facebook or MySpace, unless you happen to be a recruiter. My personal belief is that LinkedIn is sitting on a phenomenal untapped potential, which will be realized only when it adds group management features similar to what Xing has been developing all along. I just have no idea when this will happen though. In the meantime, you cannot really use LinkedIn to manage your contacts on its own, for it does not allow you to add information to contacts directly. Instead, it’s a very good companion to Microsoft Outlook as a way to create new connections, or lookup the last working email address for a contact who recently switched jobs. If you’re not using Microsoft Outlook, synchronization with your contact management application has to be done manually, which is a royal pain. I have been asking LinkedIn Corporation to add the LinkedIn unique ID to their standard CSV export about a gazillion times over the past two years, but have failed miserably so far. Note to Reid: please…

Plaxo: This one created a fair amount of controversy early on when it literally sent billions of emails requiring people to log on to the system anytime a user uploaded their contact information, in order for it to be verified. Since then, the application is a lot less disruptive, and turns out to be a very nice contact manager all around. The company acquired the HipCal calendar last year, and will release a brand new version tightly integrated with the contact manager later this year. This should bring it up to par with Big Contacts, which should make things a lot more interesting.

Xing: This last one shares the same limitations as LinkedIn in terms of pure contact management, but adds some very interesting features for group management, such as discussion forums, newsletters, news board, and event manager. It has about five times less members than LinkedIn, and tends to be more popular on the other side of the Atlantic. Nevertheless, its recent IPO gave it the resources it needs to expand, and competition is more than needed in a space that has been largely dominated by a single player for too long.

Personal Favorite
Unfortunately, I am not using any of the applications featured in this article for managing my contacts. As of today, I have 9,157 of them, and the only way to properly handle such a large amount is with a dedicated database, which I found with an enterprise-grade CRM system. I originally started with Salesforce.com, then moved to SugarCRM, for reasons that will be explained in a later post. Nevertheless, I am using LinkedIn extensively, and got them one of their best success stories. I systematically invite all my contacts to connect through LinkedIn, and got 5,572 of them to accept the request, making LinkedIn 61% effective for keeping track of your contacts, or mine at least.

What’s Missing
First, I would like to see LinkedIn and Xing provide integration with online contact management applications, especially CRM applications such as Salesforce.com and SugarCRM. Second, similar integration should be provided with online email clients such as Gmail, which contact manager is highly primitive to say the least. Third, I would like to see better integration with mobile devices, without requiring the use of any client-side software as a gateway. The famed integration between the BlackBerry device and the Microsoft Exchange server clearly demonstrated that such a thing is possible, therefore I cannot think of any reason why we could not get it sometime this year with some online contact manager.

Best Online Contact Manager
Now that we know what’s out there, it’s time for a vote. But because the few applications we reviewed were so different, we broke down the vote in three separate ones: the first for the best online contact manager, the second for the best professional networking application, and the third to tell us where you’re managing your contacts at the first place.

Note: if you cannot see the voting forms, please follow this link.

Final results will be announced next week as an update to this post. In the meantime, please help me build next week’s roundup on CRM. You can use this form courtesy of Wufoo for suggesting new applications, or providing additional information about existing ones. I would also welcome ideas for domain-specific criteria that could be used for evaluating the players on our list.

See you next week!