Getting the most from my contact list schema

[brianshupe]

I pop into this forum when I am really stumped and have always
received excellent advice in the past so I thought I would throw this
out there and see if I can get this problem solved as well.

Background:

I own a live music venue in Baltimore called The 8x10.
We are gearing up to start an email intensive dialogue with the bands
we book.
This will consist of single emails that are copied to booking agents,
band managers, tour managers, band contacts, etc.

My original idea for a schema was to create a contact using the band's
name.
I then modified the contact form to include a custom page with the
contact info for that bands booking agent, band manager, tour manager,
publicist, band member contact, etc etc.
Great idea. Had all the info neatly sorted and easy to get to.
However actually using the info proved to be impossible since outlook
is geared to us the Contact Name field as the key record.

Then I thought of a folder for each band with the contacts created
normally and stored within each folder, but outlook doesn't search
through subfolders which makes it hard to get to the data.

I have contemplated getting ACT or something similar but they have so
many features that we don't need that I hesitate.

We are currently creating a distribution list for each band and
filling it with contacts made normally for each person associated with
that band.

Is there a better way to massage the data in the contact list?
Does anyone know of 3rd party plugins that would assist?

 

[TechieBird]

How about using the band names as categories, and applying those to each
contact? If you're using Outlook 2003 or 2007 you can show your contacts
list in a By Category view, which may give you what you want. And the
up-side is that you can have more than one category per contact in case you
get two or more bands represented by the same person.

Of course that may be a lame idea and someone else might have a much better
one... ;o)