One of the most vexing problems for small businesses is managing the contacts for the entire organization in some organized fashion. There are plenty of single-user contact management programs that assume that one person will enter and update the information. Things get tricky when you have a workgroup that wants to share these contacts, and when the workgroup is either spread across the countryside or tends to travel from their central base and needs access to these contacts when on the road.

I have tried a number of solutions and want to share with you my experiences to give you an idea of how to improve things if this is a concern for you.

Probably the first piece of software that an organization tries to accomplish this is by using some kind of groupware tool such as Microsoft Exchange, Novell Groupwise or Lotus Notes. Each of these can handle contacts, and each has a Web interface that allows remote users access to the contacts data without having to cart around the entire desktop client software. But each solution requires a fair investment in hardware, software, network infrastructure and technical know-how to keep running, something that many small businesses may not have or want to get involved in.

Another thought is to go completely with Web services, and make use of one of a number of contact service sites that anyone can access from a Web browser. The advantage here is that these services are either free or so cheap that it is an easy sell to management, and that no computing infrastructure is needed at your end to keep up to date. The downside is that they are primarily designed for single users.

The service that I have been using for some time is Junglemate.com. They have a decent facility for searching my multi-thousand contact list, and it is all Web-based, free, secure and fast. While I was initially reluctant to upload all my contacts to their site, I haven't seen any compromise or penetration of my data.

My.Yahoo, Myphonebook.com, Scheduleonline.com, Magicaldesk.com, and many of the other web portals have similar services, but once you get beyond several hundred contacts, they tend to slow down when it comes time to search them. The key to using any of these services is being able to upload your contacts from a local Outlook or other software program. Most of these services accept a comma-separated file, and then you need to spend some time identifying all the various fields within the file that map to their data structure. It can be vexing to do this the first time, so be forewarned.

An improvement on these Web portals is the ability to synchronize the contacts with either your local Outlook contact file or the contacts on your PDA such as a Palm. Here you can synch your online data with several different users, but this is very tricky to accomplish and once I managed to mistakenly wipe out my entire address book. Palm.net also had this service, but now it is only available for Palm VII users. There are two basic synchronization software services from Starfish Software and from Puma Technologies. I don't have any particular opinion on which is better, but you don't really have a choice: whatever the Web portal is using is what you are stuck with.

A slightly different take on the Web services bent is GoodContacts.com. They will work with your existing Outlook address book, then proceed to send an email to everyone (what they call a scan) to verify that they are still reachable at the email address you have for them. Given how often my own contacts change their email addresses, this could be a very useful service. The hard part is that getting that first initial scan out could be difficult, particularly if you have several thousand outdated email addresses to verify. The single-user version is free, and the paid version can share contact lists, although it is a bit cumbersome. While this all sounds a bit too close to spam for me, the service does allow you to verify that someone is still at a particular email address.

Another approach is to use a Blackberry as the unit that contains your contacts. These wireless wonders became popular after the 9/11 disaster, when many people were displaced from their offices. They do work reasonably well, although again they are geared for one person to synchronize his or her own contacts between a Blackberry and a desktop running Outlook. And once you have several thousand contacts in your Blackberry, it does take some effort to scroll or search through the list.

The best product I've used for sharing contacts amongst a workgroup is from Groove Networks. This product was built with a workgroup in mind from the beginning, as opposed to many of these other solutions that began their lives with a single-user version and then tried to broaden themselves from there. Groove does a lot more than contacts: it lets you share files in workspaces that take their cue from Lotus Notes (the two products share a common design team), offering a great way to allow different collections of people to have different access levels to your information.

Groove's biggest benefit is that it provides always-on encryption for all of your computing. There are no certificates to mess around with, nothing to install: it just works and works well. It also automatically works across firewalls without any additional configuration, something that can't really be said for the other products in this roundup.

The bad news on Groove is that it is a bit cumbersome to get going, and you need to enable it for everyone in your workgroup for it to be effective. And you can't automatically point it at your Outlook address book; you have to convert the data into the Groove format. But if you have a bunch of widely distributed workers around the world, this is a solid product.

There are two other products that I want to mention: One is called PeerSwitch from Gigamediaaccess.com. This is a fairly new service that allows Web access to a machine running Outlook or Outlook Express. I haven't gotten it to work yet across my firewall, and they have promised a new version that will cross firewalls without a lot of configuration changes. The basic notion is that you install this software on your local machine, and it runs a Web service that allows remote users to search your contacts with an ordinary Web browser.

The other product, from 01Com.com, is called I'mInTouch.net. It was originally designed as a telephony management tool but has some interesting possibilities as a tool for access to your contacts, as well as your email and other files that reside on your local desktop. I haven't been able to get it work across my firewall, either. But it looks promising.

As you can see, there are a wide variety of choices and approaches. Nothing really does the complete job yet, and no one piece of software or Web service is the answer to your contact management needs. I recommend experimenting with several of the tools mentioned here. Perhaps one of them can fit your own needs and allow you to find your contacts when out of the office, yet work together with your other system tools as a coherent unit.