Relationship
Open Contacts provides two ways of making references between people and companies: static binding and loose binding.
Static Binding
You may know people working in the same organization. It will be handy that the contact info of an organization could be shared by many contacts. With Open Contacts, you could firstly input the contact info of an organization and the people contacts, then link the organization to each of the individual contacts.
Before you press the "Link Company" button, please make sure there is a company selected in the organizations List window.
To view the company info, click on the "Edit Company" link.
Departments of a company could be regarded as organizations, and you may associate many departments or subsidiaries to a company.
To view all associated contacts and parent company of a company, click on the "Associated" tab of the Edit Company window.
To associate people with the company, first select contacts from the People window, then click the "Link Selected People" button.
The links and associations may reflect or represent employment, ownership and any other relationship.
Loose Binding
In address book programs like MS Outlook, you may define names of the assistants of a contact, and the name of the assistants may or may not exist in the address book. Open Contacts could support this concept. For example, you may have a field Assistant which action type is "person", when you click on the assistant name, the action button will become for locating that person's detail. In the Quick View window with advanced style sheet, you may click on hyper link of the name to navigate to the person. Similarly, you may do the same with field Company which action type is "org".
Please check predefined fields for more details.
Summary
With static binding, linked contacts must exist in the database. For example, John Smith will be linked with General Business. Only when General Business exists, you will be able to make such link. When you remove the link, General Business still exists in the database. And when deleting General Business from the database, the link will be removed automatically. Consistency will be kept.
With loose binding, linked contacts may or may not exist in the database. Even if a linked contact exists in the database, after deleting the contact, the loose binding will remain there. This will give you flexibility. For example, you may not want to know too much detail about a person's assistant.