VCARD Download

[tleish-p40]

How do you handle cleanup? We have families moving in and out of our ward all the time. How would you auto-delete those that are no longer in the Unit? Palm Desktop had a feature where you could sync a group of addresses to any csv file. It would auto add/delete addresses to match this.

However, one problem this caused is you could not edit the contacts, since the changes would be overwritten the next time you got an update.

[thedqs]

I know Outlook has an API that interfaces with the contacts. I never thought about having the ward's contacts in my Outlook, but I think it is a great idea. Along those lines, outlook has a place for a picture to be imported and I was wondering if an option for VCard with Picture could be included.
I will probabily tinker around with this and try to get something that syncs with the vcard. (Ex. You download vcard and open with this program, program goes through your contacts and updates, removes, or adds them)
In response with the auto-cleanup I could include in the notes field the Ward name or simple word that will be used for knowing what contacts are part of the ward list.

[grhart-p40]

Along those lines, outlook has a place for a picture to be imported and I was wondering if an option for VCard with Picture could be included.

I'll second that. Pete, would it be much trouble to include the "PHOTO" type in the vCard download, which would include the household's uploaded JPEG? Spec here: http://www.imc.org/pdi/ Does someone know how to handle the image encryption that the .vcf wants?

For general membership, I think the vCards would be complete with a "BDAY" type (minus the birth-year), and support for individuals' work/cell phone nums (the later probably being a bigger MLS issue?).

Down the road, it would be wonderful to see a second incarnation of the vCard download, available only to bishoprics, exec secretaries, and clerks, with even more helpful information. I might add into the vCard "NOTES": home/visiting teachers, Temple Rec Expiration, full B-day, Membership Number, and Calling.

-Greg

[johnshaw]

I know Outlook has an API that interfaces with the contacts. I never thought about having the ward's contacts in my Outlook, but I think it is a great idea. Along those lines, outlook has a place for a picture to be imported and I was wondering if an option for VCard with Picture could be included.
I will probabily tinker around with this and try to get something that syncs with the vcard. (Ex. You download vcard and open with this program, program goes through your contacts and updates, removes, or adds them)
In response with the auto-cleanup I could include in the notes field the Ward name or simple word that will be used for knowing what contacts are part of the ward list.

I have all the Ward members as contacts so I only have one place to look for phone/address information. As I import them into Outlook, they also synch with my smartphone/pda so that information is always in my phone as well. If the photo's were part of this - my smartphone also displays the Outlook photo when I recieve an incoming call.

I believe that full stake name and ward name are already in the VCARD download.

[thedqs]

Ok looks good, I'll play around with this and see what I can come up with. I'll program it in C# since Outlook is only for windows.

And what is better for everyone, to seperate the wards into seperate folders or set the catergories as [Stake];[Ward]?

[Pete]

would it be much trouble to include the "PHOTO" type in the vCard download, which would include the household's uploaded JPEG? Spec here: http://www.imc.org/pdi/ Does someone know how to handle the image encryption that the .vcf wants?

The encoding is Base64 Content-Transfer-Encoding as defined on page 24 of RFC 2045. This might be a piece of work, I'll look into what libraries are available in the environment.

For general membership, I think the vCards would be complete with a "BDAY" type (minus the birth-year), and support for individuals' work/cell phone nums (the later probably being a bigger MLS issue?).

Adding the BDAY is easy from a technical standpoint. The Church is careful about the information it releases about members on the website so getting approval is the hard part.

good suggestions.

[thedqs]

Ok here is a quick release, I hope it works with Outlook 2003 since I developed it on Outlook 2007. The zip comes with all the source code, which is not very nice to read since I was trying to get something out. It is on my site at this address https://sourceforge.net/project/showfil ... _id=188353 I would appriciate any improvements that can be made on it. And you can just send me an e-mail with the edited files.

Thanks,

[ShellineSE]

The encoding is Base64 Content-Transfer-Encoding as defined on page 24 of RFC 2045. This might be a piece of work, I'll look into what libraries are available in the environment.

The V6 Command Reference includes commands for encoding and decoding Base64 streams. I'll send you a copy.

[thedqs]

Thanks, I'll try to get a paeg around this software, or just make it a sourceforge project so that it is a lot easier to manage through a source protection service.

[thedqs]

Ok I got the project space on SourceForge at http://sourceforge.net/projects/vcard2outlook Though I still need to upload the source to it. Any problems with it sould be reported as bugs there. Also if anyone wants to help they can just message me with their SourceForge userid.