Plaxo For More Pax
This may be the solution for managing multiple contacts, calendars, and tasks I've been looking for.
This is my first look at Plaxo. As I use it in the coming weeks, I plan to do a more thorough review. Over the years I have collected contacts in Outlook (work and home), Yahoo, and Google. Plaxo helped me quickly pull all these together and merge the duplicates. If you have a similar situation, Plaxo may be for you.
What is it? It's an online service that allows you to keep contacts, calendars, and tasks in sync across multiple platforms. It also lets you access these from the web.
Will it survive? I think so. One, I think it's a service that's needed. Two, although it's in beta, it's pretty well done. Three, they have a good revenue model. You can use the free set of services or try the premium set for 30 days. The premium set is $50 US per year but includes the best feature they offer: the De-Duper. Four, they seem to be growing pretty quickly. Already a number of my friends have signed up. One added benefit is that Plaxo will update my address book when my friends change their info in Plaxo. Pretty cool.
The De-Duper is Super. At my firm we use an enterprise level contact management system: nobody likes it. One of the reasons is the feature that removes duplicates is complicated. The Plaxo De-Duper makes it easy to remove duplicates from both your contacts and your calendar.
Painless Import from LinkedIn. It looks like future plans include the ability to sync to LinkedIn but for now the "one way sync (a.k.a. import) works well.
Nearly Painless Sync with Yahoo. Syncing with Yahoo requires going to a separate window to login to your yahoo account. Other than that, it was a breeze.
Google: good sync with Calendar but disappointing that it didn't sync with Gmail contacts.
Bottom line: I'm trying the Premium service right now. So far, I am really liking it. I was able to pull all my address books together and get rid of the duplicates in about ½ hour. I've been thinking of doing this by hand for months. Plaxo made it really easy and saved me hours. When Gmail and LinkedIn are fully integrated, I think it's really going to be a nice addition to my toolset. Worth trying out.
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