School of Computing Science & Engineering

GALGOTIAS UNIVERSITY, UTTAR PRADESH

Project Report
on
CONTACT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Submitted By
ABHISHEK JAISWAL
Enrolment no: - 1713104024
Bachelor of Computer Application
Under Guidance of
Ms. Nikita

Dr. Avneesh Chauhan

Project Coordinator
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I am very glad to take this opportunity to acknowledge all those who

helped me in designing, developing and successful execution of my
Project on “CONTECT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM”.

I would like to extend my thanks and gratitude to my Project guide

Ms. Nikita for his valuable guidance and timely assistance throughout
the development of this project.

I would like to thank my guide, who helped us understand the current

system and for giving his valuable assistance as he would be the end
user of this ' GALGOTIAS UNIVERSITY.’

I would also like to extend my thanks and gratitude to my Course

Incharge and Class Incharge Prof. without whose help and support this
project would not have been possible.

Thank you

PAGE INDEX

1 Introduction
1.1 Introduction to system
1.2 Scope of System
1.3 FIELD STUDY OF CONTACT MANAGEMENT
2 Analysis
2.1 Fact Finding Techniques

2.1.1 The Value of Contact Information

2.2 Feasibility Study

2.3 Hardware and Software Requirements

3 System Designing
3.2 Study and Factors of contect
3.4 File Dessign or Data Dictionary

4 Form Designing(with input values)

5 Advantages and Limitation

6 Bibliography

ABSTRACT
Much of our daily communication activity involves managing interpersonal communications
and relationships. Despite its importance, this activity of contact management is poorly
understood. We report on field and lab studies that begin to illuminate it. A field study of
business professionals confirmed the importance of contact management and revealed a major
difficulty: selecting important contacts from the large set of people with whom one
communicates. These interviews also showed that communication history is a key resource for
this task. Informants identified several history-based criteria that they considered useful. We
conducted a lab study to test how well these criteria predict contact importance. Subjects
identified important contacts from their email archives. We then analyzed their email to extract
features for all contacts. Reciprocity, recency and longevity of email interaction proved to be
strong predictors of contact importance. The experiment also identified another contact
management problem: removing ‘stale’ contacts from long term archives. We discuss the design
and theoretical implications of these results.

1.1 INTRODUCTION
Theorizing about asynchronous communication has been dominated by comparisons with face-
to-face communication . Early asynchronous theories emphasized media differences arguing
that asynchronous communication differs from face-to-face communication because of the
absence of non-verbal information afforded by gaze and gesture. However, the emphasis on
media differences leaves other crucial aspects of asynchronous communication unexamined,
particularly those that stem from its persistent nature. We explore those persistent aspects of
asynchronous communication in this paper. Research on email, voicemail, and Usenet has
revealed various critical features of asynchronous, technologically mediated interpersonal
conversations. These conversations consist of multiple messages exchanged over a fairly
extended period of time: days, weeks, or even months. This extension of conversations over
time implies that people are typically engaged in multiple conversations at any given time. And
each conversation often involves multiple people. These properties lead to significant problems
of conversation management. People find it difficult to keep track of the content and status of
their multiple conversations, as well as the identity, contact information, and expertise of all
their conversational partners. Maintaining knowledge of one’s contacts is a significant problem
in its own right we refer to this problem as contact management. Contact management is clearly
complex. A major problem is that people are exposed to an unmanageable number of potential
contacts. This is exacerbated by widespread use of distribution lists . It would be both onerous
and unnecessary to store detailed information about all these potential contacts. As a result,
individuals must decide:
(a) which of these potential contacts are important enough to retain information about; and
(b) what sorts of information to retain about these chosen contacts.

1.2 SCOPE OF THE SYSTEM

The system will be a Stand-Alone System for Contect Management

System Unit of GALGOTIAS UNIVERSITY.

This system will be designed to minimize the manual work in

maintaining Contect details, Phone number and all other activities under
phone contect system.

It aims to maximize the productivity and provide improved managed

System. This System will be easy to understand and use.

More specifically, this system is designed to allow an admin to manage

the records of stocks and goods.

The software will facilitate creation of different Reports such as Expense

and several other Reports.

1.3 FIELD STUDY OF CONTACT MANAGEMENT

We present new findings about contact management derived from a field study of workplace
communication practices. Other aspects of this study have been reported elsewhere . The study
had two related goals:
(1) to identify the main problems informants experienced with current communication
applications; and
(2) to document the key strategies that users had evolved to address these problems. The study
consisted of semi-structured interviews and observations of 20 business professionals. They
included financial analysts, lawyers, brokers, estate agents, bankers, IT managers, academics,
researchers, secretaries, administrators, marketing managers, conference organizers, and public
relations specialists. They worked in a variety of settings from multinational corporations to
personally owned small businesses. We asked them what communication tools they used, to
explain how they used these tools, to describe the main problems with these tools, and to
identify strategies they used to cope with the problems. The main tools used were email,
voicemail, IM, fax, phone, and written documents. We observed the informants using their
tools, also focusing on their use of communication support tools (such as address books, PDAs,
and post-it notes) to manage contact information.
We first describe the nature and value of contact information and the ad hoc set of tools used to
manage it. We then elaborate: (a) the problems people experience in deciding whom to maintain
contact information about; and (b) the onerous nature of data entry for the large number of
contacts that most people possess. Finally we document the criteria people use to decide which
of this huge set of contacts to keep track of.

2.1 The Value of Contact Information

We observed a wide variety of tools being used to store and retrieve contact information. They
included: dedicated tools such as personal address books (both digital and physical); corporate
directories; organization charts; “tool-specific” address books in email and speed-dial lists for
phones; business cards – either in rolodexes or kept loose; ‘hotlists’ – small sets of frequently
called numbers placed in salient locations; pieces of paper on refrigerator doors, post-it notes,
notes on calendars. A first question we put to informants was why they thought it was so
important to maintain their own personal contact information, when much of the information
they stored was publicly available. This is particularly true for employees of large corporations,
who have access to corporate directories and organization charts. Three features of current
business practice led people to keep personal contact information: (1) Informants often worked
with partners or clients from other organizations, and they did not have access to corporate
directories for these people; (2) They often needed access to contact information while on the
move. It is much easier to take one’s contact information along in a PDA or filofax than to
access a corporate database from a hotel room or client’s office; (3) Corporate databases do not
contain the esoteric, personal information needed to maintain a relationship with a contact
(birthdays, universities, sports team allegiances, number of children, and so on). Informants
were unanimous about the value of their contact information. This was evident not only from
their comments, but also from the time they invested in creating and maintaining contact
archives. As one informant, Mary, a freelance researcher, pointed out, her personal contact list
was a resource that pervaded all of her work.

2.1 Problems: Contact Selection, Data Entry, Tool Diversity However, contact management
has a number of associated difficulties. At first glance, the main problem informants had was
the number of contacts they needed to manage. We estimate that this number varied from a low
of several hundred to well into the thousands, although reliable
estimation was hard given the large number of contact management tools people typically used,
and the fact that there was often duplication between these. Upon further examination, though,
deeper problems concerned: (a) the need to make an explicit decision that someone was a
valuable contact; (b) the diversity of tools used; and (c) data entry.

2.2 Contact Selection. When someone calls you on the phone, leaves you voicemail, sends you
email, or hands you a business card, what do you do? Do you record their contact information
or not? The difficulty is that it is hard to anticipate whether, and to what extent, you will need
to communicate with that person in the future. Whether someone is an “important contact” only
becomes clear over time. The ease of electronic communication, especially the ability to
broadcast messages to large numbers of people at little cost, exacerbates this problem: you may
be cc’ed on messages, get email from various distribution lists, or receive mass mailings. To be
safe, our informants often “over-saved” information, leading to huge rolodexes, overflowing
booklets of business cards, and faded post-it notes scattered around their work areas. Despite
this strategy, participants were still exposed to many more contacts than they recorded
information about. One reason for this was the laborious nature of recording contact
information.

2.3 Data Entry. Informants made it clear that contact information is costly to acquire and
especially hard to maintain. They often wanted to record various types of addressing
information for a particular contact: work, home, and mobile phone numbers, fax number, email
address, postal address, instant messaging alias, as well as the IM system it was good for, and so
on. And, as we mentioned earlier, some people found it important to include detailed personal
and social information that was useful in maintaining an effective relationship with that contact.

2.4 Diversity of Tools. All the informants used ad hoc combinations of tools, with some people
evolving highly complex and idiosyncratic systems. For example, Mary, the freelance
researcher, had over 1000 people in her email address book, a 60 page Word document
containing over 1200 people, over 400 people in her PDA, as well as miscellaneous people in
Christmas card lists. Ollie, a corporate research scientist, kept 7 different address books, using 2
PDAs, Microsoft Outlook, and 4 independent email address books. He also wrote key work
numbers on his office blackboard. One reason why these complex systems evolved was that
informants seldom ‘cleaned up’ their contact information. People were loath to delete any
contact information. This seemed to be motivated both by the effort of data entry, along with the
belief that even little used contact information may be relevant at some future time.

2.5 Criteria for Determining Contact Importance Returning to the basic decision people face –
is this an important contact? – we sought to find out how our informants dealt with this issue.
Informants responded with a surprising consensus. Since they could not make this decision at
first exposure, they relied largely on the history of their prior interactions. Further individual
factors, such as communication style seemed to affect the number and type of contacts selected.
In our interviews, we probed informants to identify specific aspects of interaction history and
communication style that were critical in determining important contacts. We asked people to
walk us through their contact management tools and explain why particular contacts had been
included.

3. EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF FACTORS UNDERLYING

PERCEPTIONS OF CONTACT IMPORTANCE
The experiment examined the criteria underlying user’s judgments of contact importance. We
presented people with sets of contacts automatically extracted from their email archive. The
archives included messages sent by the user to others. They excluded messages that users had
received but deleted, as we had no way of accessing these. For each extracted contact we asked
users whether they wanted to include that contact in their contact management system in order
to keep in touch with them. For each email contact, we also recorded header information from
the email archive about each message involving the contact. From this data, we can compute
quantitative characteristics of that contact’s communication history involving the user, including
the frequency, recency, reciprocity and longevity of their exchanges. We can therefore
determine the extent to which the decision to select a particular contact correlated with these
aspects of communication history. The second part of the study examines individual differences
in communication style on contact selection. We considered an alternative experimental design,
where instead of having users select contacts extracted from email, we simply looked at the
contacts already in their email address books. However our field study research suggested using
existing contact entries was problematic: address books often contained out-of-date contacts
who had never been removed, or contacts who had been added in anticipation of interactions
that never materialized. We wanted instead to collect information about currently important
contacts.
3.1 Hypotheses:
The hypotheses are derived from the criteria suggested by our users in the field study.
Communication .The communication hypotheses concern frequency, reciprocity, recency and
longevity. First we expected important contacts to interact more frequently with the user.
Frequency is defined as the total number of messages exchanged between contact and user,
divided by the longevity of their relationship.
3.2 Frequency: Important contacts should have more frequent exchanges with the user than
unimportant ones. We also expected important contacts to show greater reciprocity, so that
messages exchanged with important contacts should contain roughly equal numbers of sent and
received messages. Reciprocity is defined as (number of messages sent)/(number of messages
sent + number of messages received). This definition gives a high reciprocity score to a user
sending multiple messages to a contact, but receiving few in return. This situation demonstrates
a high investment on the part of the user in maintaining the communication, which we would
expect to be reflected in a high perceived value for the contact. Other possible definitions of
reciprocity involve the use of message replies (re:). However the header logs that we collected
did not contain the message subject lines needed to extract this information.
3.3 Reciprocity:
Important contacts should demonstrate greater communication reciprocity than unimportant
ones We also made a more specific prediction about unsolicited communication, which is a
specific instance of (lack of) reciprocity. We define unsolicited communication as cases where a
contact sends messages to the user, but there is never any communication from the user to the
contact. While this definition is simple, it may however, overestimate unsolicited
communication by including people who have sent messages that the user intends to respond to.
Unsolicited communication: Contacts who send messages to the user, but never receive any
communication from the user should be more likely to be classified as unimportant. The next
two hypotheses concern the temporal aspects of the communication history, longevity and
recency. Longevity is defined as the total number of days between the dates of the first and last
messages exchanged by contact and user. Recency is the number of days since the last message
exchanged between user and contact. Longevity: Important contacts should interact over longer
periods than unimportant ones.
3.4 Recency:
Important contacts should have interacted with the user more recently than unimportant ones.
Individual differences in communication style The next hypothesis concerned individual
differences between users in terms of their communication style. We classified all users into
high and low frequency communicators based on whether they exchanged more messages with
contacts than the overall sample mean. We expected more intense communicators to select more
contacts because of the greater effort they invested in communication.
3.5 Method:
Users Seventeen users from a large corporate research laboratory took part in the experiment.
They included researchers, managers, secretaries, computer support staff and marketing
managers. Participants had been using their email system for an average of 3.0 years (standard
deviation 1.8 years), and so all had substantial numbers of messages in their archives.
Task We presented users with an on-line list of extracted contacts. For each contact we showed
contact name (e.g. Abhi , jaiswal), email name (e.g. ajaiswal), domain name (gmaiil.com), the
number of messages received by the user from that contact, the number of message sent by the
user to that contact, the date of the first message exchanged by user and contact, the date of the
last message exchanged. This information was presented in a spreadsheet-like table. The
columns could be sorted, making it possible to order contacts by the number of messages they
sent to the user, or by the domain name of the contact, and so on. This allowed users to examine
and order the extracted contacts in multiple ways, while making their choices. One concern is
that the columns in the table may have biased users to focus on particular contact
characteristics. However, pilot studies showed that without techniques to systematically sort and
view data, users quickly became overwhelmed by the task of judging hundreds of contacts. We
asked users to select important contacts for inclusion in their contact management system. They
were told to choose contacts based on whether ‘you might want to be in contact with them
again’. Users could make three possible judgments. They could decide that contacts: (a) should
be added to their contact management system, i.e. that they were worth keeping in touch with;
(b) should be excluded from the system, i.e. they were not worth keeping in touch with; and (c)
that they were unsure of the status of the contact.

3.6 Results
Characteristics of Extracted Contacts and the Selection Process Before testing our hypotheses,
we present some general observations about the characteristics of the original archives and the
set of contacts our users rated as important. We also present some observations about the
selection process.

Mean Standard Deviation

1. Number of Contacts 859 775
Extracted from Archive
2. Number of Contacts Rated as 119 79
by Users as Important
3. Percentage of Extracted 19% 13%
Contacts Rated by Users as
Important
4. Percentage of Extracted 30% 12%
Contacts that Engaged in
Unsolicited Communication
5. Percentage of Extracted 37% 21%
Contacts Only Appearing as
ccs or bccs
6. Percentage of Extracted 72% 15%
Contacts From External
Organizations

Table 1: The Character of Extracted Contacts

Table 1 shows overall statistics for the extracted contacts.
A number of features of the table are worth noting: • Consistent with our interview results, users
are exposed to a large number of contacts. We extracted an average of 859 contacts from each
person’s archive.
• Again consistent with our interviews, users rated as important only a small percentage (19%) of
the contacts they were exposed to.
• A substantial proportion of contacts (30%) extracted from user’s archives engaged in unsolicited
communication, i.e. they sent messages to the user, who never responded to them.
• A substantial proportion of contacts (37%) extracted from user’s archives never communicated
directly with the user. They only appeared on the cc or bcc lines of messages.
• Another somewhat surprising statistic was the large proportion of contacts (72%) we extracted
from the archive that were from outside the user’s organization, as indicated by their email address.
• There were large differences between users for all measures as reflected by the large standard
deviation scores.

4. COMPARISON OF FIELD AND LAB STUDIES

Our field data suggested a significant, but currently underresearched problem, that of contact
management. People are exposed to large numbers of potential contacts, but the onerous nature of
data entry means that they end up being conservative about who they add to their contact
management systems. Despite this, people have a large number of contacts that they have to
manage, but end up using a variety of ad hoc tools for this purpose. Our experimental results
confirm the interview data in two important respects. First, consistent with the interview data,
people are exposed to a large number of contacts (859 on average), only 19% of whom they judge
as important. This supports the idea that people are exposed to many more contacts than they want
to keep in touch with. This in turn suggests that contact selection is an important process. Second,
the experiment confirmed the criteria that our interviewees suggested for identifying important
contacts. We found evidence that a contact’s communication history, and communication style
were important determinants of whether a contact was selected. Frequency, reciprocity, longevity,
and recency predicted subjective importance, as did contact affiliation and the style of the user’s
communication.

5. DESIGN AND THEORY IMPLICATIONS

Several design suggestions follow from these results. First, our regression analysis is a model for
identifying important contacts in email, and this could be implemented directly as an algorithm.
The ability to automatically identify important contacts from communication archives might be
used in a number of applications, allowing us to improve messaging applications, support
reminding and provide social recommendation. Messaging applications are currently poorly
integrated with contact management tools, but future systems could exploit information about
important contacts in a variety of ways. These might include alerting, filtering and prioritization
of incoming email or voicemail messages based on the sender’s importance. Tighter integration of
contact information with messaging logs could be also used to manage relationships with contacts,
e.g. reminding the user when they haven’t talked to an important contact in a long time. We have
implemented contact-based alerting and reminding in a social network based user interface to
communication and information . Finally social recommendation systems might be able to exploit
information about a register of important contacts to either direct a user query or guide information
access. Other design implications concern contact management tools directly. We could improve
address book utility by using our algorithm to automatically recommend that a potentially
important contact should be added to the address book, based on their communication history. But
even if we provide ways to better identify significant contacts, data entry is still a major problem.
One possible way to address this would be to identify contact information from other sources, such
as Internet home pages containing addresses. We may also be able to mine other types of records
such as phone and voicemail logs, or use reverse lookup to provide detailed addresses for contacts.
Having general techniques for populating address books is clearly important. One unexpected
finding from our research was that 72% of important contacts came from outside the user’s
organization. While this may depend on the specific user population, it suggests that corporate
address books or intranets have limited utility as a way to provide detailed addresses for contacts.

HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE

REQUIREMENTS

✓ Hardware Specification

Processor : Intel Pentium iv

Processor Speed : 1GHz to 2GHz
RAM : 512MB to 1GB
Hard Disk : 4GB to 30GB
Keyboard : 104 keys

✓ Software Specification.

Language : Microsoft Visual Basic

Database : Microsoft Access
Operating System : Windows XP / Vista
1.FRONT PAGE OF PHONE CONTECT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
a.FIRST NAME
b.LAST NAME
c.PHONE NO.
d.EMAIL
e.ADDRESH
2.SAVE CONTECT WITH UPLOAD IMAGE

3.USING SEARCH TOOL

2.CONTECT DETAILS

5.USING ACCESS DATABASE

 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We thank everyone who participated in the experiment and the interviews for their help, and
especially to Bonnie Nardi for many discussions of these ideas.

REFERENCES

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3. Granovetter, M. (1973). The Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology 78,
6, 1360-1380.
4. Haythornthwaite, C., Wellman, B., & Mantei, M. (1995). Work Relationships and Media
Use: A Social Network Analysis. Group Decision and Negotiation, 4, 193-211.
5. Millen, D. and Henderson, D. (2000). PhoneMan – The Benefits of Personal Call
Histories, In CHI2000, New York, ACM, 155-156.