The Contacts File That Outlasted the Software

This database is a Memento migration of an Outlook or Lotus Organizer contacts export. The ISDN field, the Telex field, the Car Phone field, the Radio Phone, the Pager — these are not oversights. They are the complete field set of late-1990s professional contact management, brought forward intact because the person's contact record and their business relationship history are worth preserving even when the communication channels have changed.

The Telex number is not active in 2015. But the contact it belongs to has been a referral source for twenty years. The record gets migrated complete, not stripped to what's currently relevant.

The Hierarchy Beneath the Name

Beyond First/Middle/Last and Title/Suffix, the template tracks Initials and — critically — Manager's Name and Assistant's Name. Those two fields are the organizational embedding of a contact. In small business networking, the assistant is often who you actually reach. "Leave a message with Karen" is information that belongs in the record, next to the person's direct line, not in a sticky note on the phone.

Referred By is the referral chain. When your network is built on introductions rather than cold outreach, knowing who vouched for a contact is relationship context. Referred By turns the network from a flat list into a graph — you can trace clusters of contacts back to the original introduction. After five years of consistent entry, you can see which two or three relationships generated the majority of your introductions.

Internet Free/Busy is an Outlook scheduling flag — it records whether the contact's calendar is published and accessible for scheduling, or blocked. It was used in Exchange environments where external parties could see availability before requesting meetings. For anyone still operating in that kind of enterprise environment, it's a useful pre-call qualifier: Free means the request will go through the availability check; Busy means you're working blind.

Three Address Sets and the Billing Separation

Home address across five fields (Street, Street 2, Street 3, PO Box, City, State, Postal Code, Country). Business address across the same five. Other address — the third set — handles vacation properties, secondary offices, seasonal addresses, or billing addresses that differ from both home and business.

The Mileage field is travel-to-this-contact mileage — the distance from your location to theirs, used for business travel reimbursement calculations when the contact requires an in-person visit. Billing Information is the account code or contract reference under which work for this contact is billed. In a small professional services firm, both fields are necessary: mileage drives expense reimbursement, billing information determines which engagement gets the invoice.

Hobby, Spouse, Children — these are the relationship personalization fields. In small business networking at the community level (SJ suggests San Jose or a similar metropolitan small business chamber), the personal touchpoints matter. Knowing a contact's spouse's name before a dinner event is not trivia. It's the difference between a warm conversation and an awkward introduction.

User 1 Through User 4: The Flex Layer

Four free-text User fields with no predefined purpose. Every networking database reaches a point where there's information that doesn't fit any named field — an unusual connection circumstance, a specific favor owed, a technical specialty that doesn't map to Profession or Job Title. The User fields absorb that overflow without requiring a schema change.

Keywords is the freeform tag field for search — trade associations, industry verticals, specialties, event contexts ("met at SBDC workshop 2014," "Rotary connection," "former client"). Categories is the grouping tag from the original Outlook hierarchy — whether that was Hot Prospects, Vendors, Referral Partners, or whatever taxonomy the original contact file used.

Directory Server holds the LDAP directory URL from the Exchange era — the server address used to look up this contact's corporate directory entry. Sensitivity and Priority are Outlook metadata fields: whether a contact record was marked Normal, Personal, Private, or Confidential, and whether the relationship was flagged as a priority follow-up.

Callback is the note for next contact timing: "call after Q1 close," "do not contact before May." It's not a date field — it's a human-readable instruction that belongs in prose, not a timestamp.