Funny the things you don’t think about until you hear someone doing it a different way. In this case it was at the December oPASS meeting and Kendal Van Dyke was talking entering business cards he had gathered at PASS and how long it took. I remarked that I’ve stopped doing that in large part, instead looking them up on LinkedIn and adding to my network. I had to go look to be sure, but there is an option in LI to download a vCard from those you’re connected to. I usually only add info to Outlook for people that I’m going to contact on a regular basis, mostly so that I have the auto lookup of their email, and so that I’ll have their info on my phone (sync to Blackberry) if I need it. Trying to keep all my contacts in Outlook seems like more work than needed, no easy process to sync Outlook to LI, and without that the info in Outlook gradually goes stale. Now if there was a utility that just did the sync automatically, would I have that info in Outlook? I see no reason not to then, for me – right now – it’s just being thrifty about how much time I spend managing contacts.

Kendal is looking at card scanners and some other options, hoping he’ll post some thoughts on those soon.