ContacTree Personal (CTP)

ContacTree Personal (CTP) is a unique product, based on Microsoft Outlook, that allows an individual user to automatically build a tree of an organisation based on contacts acquired and accessed through the ubiquitous Microsoft Outlook. It is provided with tools that speed up and simplify the recording of any contact information, however fragmentary it may be – and then keeping it all up to date.

The fundamental paradigm is that in addition to recording the location and other personal details of a specific contact known to us, that there could be others who belong to the same organisation that may be important to us. The names and responsibilities of those others in that organisation may be less directly known, or are learned or inferred from a variety of different sources.

At the end of the day the ability to construct a live organisation chart for our contact and his immediate colleagues tells us a great deal about who is important to us within that organisation.

The chart also has navigation features that enable the user to intuitively pick and open the record for an individual whose name, title and function he might only half-remember (perhaps in a foreign language), and therefore searching for the record through conventional keyword search would be inefficient and time-consuming.

The information about where and how we came by that information is also relevant to our understanding of each individual and may rely on what could be defined as a User Profile for the provider of that information.

ContacTree Enterprise (CTE). 

In the single user ‘Personal’ Outlook-based version, the use of complex User Profiling processes would be rather trivial and specious. The real value of the User Profile comes in the multi user ContacTree Enterprise currently under development. ContacTree Enterprise is compatible with Microsoft Exchange/ Sharepoint file structures, but can be readily migrated to other bases.

ContacTree Enterprise takes, and makes available, the multiple views of each contact in Outlook from a number of users. Once a contact has been entered by users, and has been categorised by them, they are combined into a single overall view that is again accessible from the desktop in Outlook.

The OrgChart produced of the combined view may then be used not only to navigate to the contact that you really need, but also to peel away the logic layers to establish who in your team knows your contact the best – or most recently.

Global Contact Manager ™

ContacTree technology has been licensed to Data Perspective Limted (DPL), experts in Search and Personalization. DPL are combining this with their Fuzzy User Profile technology to create a 'Global Contact Manager' in which the attributes of the 'owner' of a contact become an attribute of the datat, and are used to automate the process of combining and cleansing overlapping information within large teams of users. 

This provides a sales & marketing team with unique power and access to the full intelligence on your contact base. Perhaps even more importantly, if you have a really large field of contacts, it helps you to automate the ways that you accrete and combine the disparate sources of contact knowledge throughout your Enterprise.

Learn more about user profiling at Data Perspective

Who Needs ContacTree™?

ContacTree Personal is aimed mainly at sole-traders, enterprises with a single sales/marketing person or users of Outlook BCM, which permits a small number of users to share a single file. There are perhaps 50 million of these entities world-wide, and some 100 million copies of Outlook have been sold. It is not envisaged that User Profiling processes will play a significant part in developing this sector of this personal productivity Market.

The prime market for ContacTree Enterprise is more in medium to large companies needing to combine sales contacts from many users into an integrated global contact information manager, enabling a common view of a customer company. This moves the product clearly into the £20Bn a year CRM market. There is no other like product on the market that gives the extra dimension to the global contact database, and it therefore is an attractive utility that supports a Market Prospecting process and will be available both directly and through chosen channels/partners in the CRM market.