Was Open Contacts designed for your use cases?

Open Contacts is an address book, or contact management program. However, it is not a CRM or PIM program.

If you find existing address book / PIM programs that your are using can not fit your needs, Open Contacts is a much more powerful candidate for you to consider. However, if you want event tracking, sale/marketing activities as well as billing etc., then Open Contacts is not for you. Obviously you should then eyes on CRM programs. Open Contacts is positioned as a bridge between conventional address book program and CRM program.

One of the features that make Open Contacts stood out of existing address book programs is its great extendibility to other programs running on desktop or the web. Though Open Contacts is not a PIM program, however, it is relatively easy to construct a PIM utility using existing programs. Please read
Build your own portable PIM with Open Contacts and other portable programs
for details.

Security

Many users are concerned by the security of address book data. While security is essential to privacy of you and your contacts, it is more practical for you to understand what security level you need, and what resources available for security, while there are many security solutions around.

An SQL database can be secured when authentication mechanism is sound and the database files are kept in a safe place. If the files got stolen, the authentication mechanism will be lost. While it is not rare to encrypt data in a database, however, this will bring penalty to performance, and queries will be made difficult.

Data security is a big topic not likely to be discussed here in detail. Though Open Contacts does not provide built-in security, however, it is easy to use existing resources to introduce certain level of security to Open Contacts.

If you use Open Contacts in LAN environment, you may put the database file in a secured server. Client machines should not be able to access the database file directly, but through Firebird database server. Please work with your system administrator to improve data security. If the contact data contain linked files, the directories of these files should allow client machines to access.

If you use Open Contacts in desktop mode, you has better to run your account in LUA mode, and put the database files into a folder exclusively accessed by your account.

If you use Open Contacts in an external drive, you many consider to use an open source freeware program called TrueCrypt located at www.truecrypt.org. TrueCrypt also support green installation on an external drive. You may then put Open Contacts and related files to the encrypted storage managed by TrueCrypt. Please study the TrueCrypt website for more details.

Please note, we do not provide technical supports to general questions of Windows, LUA, encryption and TrueCrypt etc.