The Family Address Book 1.0 review

The Family Address Book is a web-based shared address book

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 260K Developer: TFAB Team

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The Family Address Book is a web-based shared address book. Integrated with your default email client, sending emails from TFAB is a snap.

The Family Address Book displays natively in MS Outlook and is platform independent.

After keeping separate MS Outlook files (.pst), hence separate address books, for some time, my wife and I were running into problems such as: "who has the latest address for Bob?", who has "Grandma's phone number?" or "in what Email inbox is Jim's email address?".

As a result I decided to take the bull by the horn and get to a point where we would share the same address book. This address book would allow us to send emails and store our family contacts information.

So what's the big deal you may say? What's so special about sharing MS Outlook's address book? Well, for one MS Outlook contacts are not easy to share if you're not running MS Exchange or Active Directory. It's even more difficult when using MS Outlook in an Internet only mode. Second, workarounds to share contacts when MS Outlook is in Internet only mode are cumbersome.

So here are the goals (i.e. functional requirements) I set:

- No matter the family member, there's a single, centralized address book holding all contacts.
- The address book is integrated with MS Outlook so emails can be sent to people.
- The address book can be run independently from MS Outlook. This provides:
- An extra layer of flexibility when using contact information for a purpose other than sending emails (e.g. New Year's cards,...)
- Flexibility when using other email clients (e.g. Thunderbird, Eudora, Outlook Express,...)

The Family Address Book was born. Welcome to TFAB!

Requirements:
MySQL 4 or 5
PHP 4 or 5
Apache 2

Here are some key features of "The Family Address Book":
Free of charge.
A shared address book, supporting concurrent access.
Integrated with MS Outlook and other email clients so that emails can be sent to people.
Accommodate several users at once.
Platform independent so that TFAB can sustain hardware and OS evolutions.
Optionally, can be hosted on a centralized computer (e.g. a server) so there's no need to worry about a computer being turned on while attempting to access TFAB.