Sort contacts into groups, sub-groups, sub-sub-groups, etc.
- Telescoping groups allow you to better categorize your contacts
- You might have groups like "Family", "Florida", and "Seattle". Then you place "Housemates" and "Dorm Buddies" in "Florida" and "Friends" and "Coworkers" in "Seattle"
- You can always turn on list mode to view every contact alphabetically if you don't like groups
Add unlimited number of properties to a given contact
- "Home phone 1", "Home phone 2" and "Home phone 3" are often not enough, so you can add as many phone numbers, email addresses, notes and even birthdays as you want to a particular contact
Simple setup, unzip the package, edit lib/config.php, then open setup.php in your browser and follow the five steps
- Upgrading is even simpler: unzip the package and copy over your old lib/config.php, and you're done
- Known to be compatabile with Linux, other Unix (any POSIX OS with PHP), and Mac OS X
- Search by any property of a contact, find all friends in a particular area code, like 510, or find all with @gmail.com accounts
Quick-view properties for easy access on a per-contact basis
- Often mail someone at a certain address, but have to look it up each time? Mark it as QuickView so you can see it as soon as you login.
Import and export vCards (fully compliant to 3.0 spec)
- Import many contacts into OAB by uploading a multiple-person vCard, zip file of vCard or tarball of vCards
- Easy to perform backups and restores so you do not lose information about old friends
- Backended in vCards, so even if OAB dies, you can copy your contacts from the server, they're not in some database in some strange format you can't decipher
- Rearrange properties, sort things so most important phone numbers and addresses are near the top of the page
- Export LDIF or xCard (XML vCard), so you can send your vCard over Jabber, or to your LDAP server
Multiple users
- One install can be shared by a family, or the whole office
- Each account has it's own pool of contacts, and don't have to share
Free and open source
- If you don't like the way it works, go in and change it
- You can use it forever and not have your data depend on the financial success of some corporation. If Plaxo files for bankruptcy, will you lose your whole address book?
- Add images, also sounds and logos, either via upload onto the server, or link to a URL
Add notes on a per-property basis
- Ever have a number marked as "Home", and you can't remember if it means "Home" at parents' house or "Home" in the dorms, or "Home" at the summer cabin? Make a note!
Share personal information with friends (see Sharing)
- Link from your website to http://oab.domain.tld/Cody Smith, for example
- When the update your personal information in OAB, the change goes out immediately
Does not require MySQL or any other database
- Simple install for people with FTP access only, not database or shell
