Productivity Portfolio

Perhaps, it's the increase in spam or that many friends are going through life changes, but it seems everyone is in transition. New jobs, phone numbers, email addresses and so on. The result is my address book constantly changes.

The update process starts with the Plaxo wizard that allows you to send or request contact information. Your email request includes the option of attaching a personal card or business card. The issuing of different cards is useful as you probably have contacts you're willing to provide some information, but not all. Another differentiating feature is you can select which contacts to send information to rather than your entire address book.

The design of Plaxo has improved since I first tested this program many months ago. A table is presented of your contacts with several sortable columns such as Organization, Name, and so on. By default, the wizard figures you want to inform everyone but you can easily remedy this. If you prefer not to use the wizard, you can request an update directly from the contact record. In testing, I found the program would catch duplicate requests and prevent them from being resent.

Once the recipient receives your email, they can modify or confirm their contact information. If the user edits their information, Plaxo will update your contact information and provide an audit trail. Most people we sent requests to replied. But, there were a few who objected because of privacy concerns. They assumed Plaxo would sell their contact information or spam them. The company maintains a strict privacy policy, but we encourage people to read the privacy policy of organizations they deal with.

The program has several other features to ease the update process. For example, any time you change your record, it will be sent to other Plaxo users provided you are in their address book. For example, if I updated my Outlook record to show an area code change, that change would be communicated to just Plaxo users who have an entry for me in their address book.

The service behaved well in our testing using different email applications. We did encounter some glitches where partial contact data was displayed on the receiving end. Our informal survey of colleagues using the service was positive with an occasional problem for people using several PST files in Outlook.

One objection to the service is you must email support to discontinue your account. Otherwise, the company assumes you're still active and maintains your data. This is a logical assumption by Plaxo as the user could be reinstalling the software. However, we think the company would be better served by reminding people to contact support if they wish to stop the service. During our user survey, we encountered several people who only removed the software, but didn't notify Plaxo and so we thought they were existing users.

Finally, the concern about privacy shouldn't be dismissed, but I think people should look at privacy in a broader sense. Plaxo, like many entities, maintains information on their secure servers. They recognize that their success is linked to how people perceive their security practices. Perception is always interesting, but more so for a company that isn't a household name. Plaxo has addressed many of these issues in the FAQ section. In the interim, you might want to think about all the services, directories, clubs, etc you've joined and see how these entities protect your data.

Editor's note: This review was done against version 1.0 of the software. Since then, Plaxo has released several updates including a version that works with Mozilla Thunderbird.