Contact Management Tool?

dove posted this at 10:02 — 10th September 2003.

Joined: Jan 2002

I have 1000 organisation names and address in a word merge format. These addresses are made up of five interest groups.

I need to have all of these names and addresses available to view online (intranet) and download as labels;

I need to be able to extract (filter) those belonging to any selected interest group/s, and

I need for people (staff accessing this intranet both internally and externally) to be able to add new names and address online and categorize them according to one or more interest group/s. They also need to be able to search the info and download the info into labels.

It would also be useful to be able to set up newsletters and emails to send to selected groups or all of the contacts.

Can anyone suggest the best way to do this? Do I need to import the word merge info into access ? Can anyone recommend a reasonably priced contact management software package that will do this? I have access to MySQL.

Any help would be greatly appreciated - i've never used MySQL but am more than willing to give it a go, also, if there is a software package that can give a professional interface and offer additional options I would be very interested.

Cheers

ShaneS posted this at 20:45 — 10th September 2003.

They have: 93 posts

Joined: Jun 2003

Well what people are going to need to know...

Intranet Server: Linux, Unix, Window. What scripting languages are on it, PHP, ASP, CFM, JSP, etc., Database applications (you already mentioned MySQL), does it have office installed on the server (IE, I way to generate mail merged files on the fly).

Since you are trying to have user add/edit/delete labels, want them displayed as labels, want to sort by groups, and you want to generate a newsletter. From my experience without know the above, you best bet will probably be PHP/MySQL/Acrobat.

PHP and MySQL to power the system and handle all the processing, and Acrobat being utilized to output the label contents. The ONLY thing required to be a constant at that point theoretically should be the label size and dimennesions used. I have a feeling printers will come into play, but once you have tested it on a few you can have PHP adjust for the different selected printers.

I do beleive there is software out there that will do this, but AFAIK you need Windows, with office installed, along with MS Access or MSSQL. But I would not know.

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