Address Book Optimizer

I was looking into the optimizer and had a couple of questions. Does it do anything but clean up duplicates? For example, does it clean up addresses? Does it make the USPS friendly? Does it format phone number,etc? I don't anticipate needed the duplication cleanup regularly and was curious about the long term advantages?

Hi Jeff,

In version one of our Address Book Optimizer, the focus really is on identifying duplicate entries and intelligently presenting merge and delete options.

We do have many exciting things in mind for future versions, based upon members' interests. Let us know if you have specific ideas for what you'd like to see!

I think I mentioned this somewhere else. It would be nice if they optimizer provided some standard formatting, say like for phone numbers. It would also be great if it could query the USPS site and provide the properly formatted address.

http://www.usps.com/business/addressverification/welcome.htm

I agree with the standard formatting, although it would have to be very configurable to be useful.

As far as the optimiser:
1) an option to see the date that a contact updated or if it was before you had the date feature, then to put that down.
2) an option to identify husbands and wives! Of course you would need to add the spouse field to Plaxo, but this could be useful as I prefer to keep separate cards for husbands and wives since they usually have different dobs, cell numbers and work numbers. If there was a spouse field, then the optimiser could recognise that and not see it as a duplicate.

Autoformatting would be nice too.... some of my names and addresses are spelled with all CAPS, some with all lower case, and its a pain to go thru and standardize.

Querying the USPS site would be pretty damn impressive too.

Another useful feature (really a UI modificaton): It would help to see in the de-duplicator which address book each of the versions is coming from. I sometimes get old errors creeping back in after a duplication, and it would be useful to know which computer needs help.