Below is a post I had on the 37 Signals Answer Board. I wanted to just post it as I thought it might be interesting.

Greetings everyone, I wanted to provide an update for this issue and hopefully you find it helpful, if you have not yet figured out a good work around for the following issue. The 37Signals product Highrise recently added a way for a user to download all of their V-Cards for cases and deals. This was a very exciting new feature as our company has well over 150 Cases and Deals that we are working within. I was using this feature on Mac with no issues, but our PC users were not able to download and install the V-Cards correctly. I posted the following question to the answers.37signals.com to see if they would be able to help.

“I am able to generate v-cards on my mac that add all of the necessary contacts into my address book. When I try to do this same task on a PC (Windows Machine) I get an error and it only imports 1 v-card which is the user’s personal dropbox. I was wondering if anyone else has this issue.”

After posting my question above on the answers.37signals.com form I did not receive a response from either a fellow user or their support staff. I waited about 4 days and then I decided to email 37signals support with my question regarding the issue the new V-Card download feature. Here is the response I received from Jamis, a 37Signal support staffer:

“I’m really not sure what that could be, but it does sound like a limitation of Outlook 2007. If you have one of your team members download the file to their computer, and open it in a text editor (like notepad, etc.), does it contain multiple BEGIN:VCARD lines? (It should contain a lot more beside, but each BEGIN:VCARD indicates a separate vcard embedded in the file.) If it does contain multiple BEGIN:VCARD lines, and Outlook 2007 is only grabbing one of them, then it probably is a failing of Outlook.

- Jamis”

This was one of the most helpful reply’s I have ever gotten from 37 Signals Support. Jamis was super clear and gave me all of the information I needed to trouble shoot this issue. I downloaded a set of V-Cards on a Windows machine and opened up via notepad. He was correct, as all of the code was there, and this now became an outlook 2007 issue. Knowing this information, I had already begun to formulate a work around for the windows users.

Here are the steps I took for my work around: Please Note: this is the work flow for each user that you have as I found out the case/deal email addresses are user specific.

1) I logged on / had the user logon to High Rise and download their set of V-Cards. (Watch out for the link that resets your dropbox number, I hit the wrong one a couple of times because I was careless in trying to move too quick.)
2) I had those V-Cards emailed to me and then I opened them up with the Address Book mac application. When I opened them up in Address Book, I created a new group for them so I could delete them easily after I was done.
3) I then reviewed to make sure we had all of the address that we were exporting for each user and then dragged those v-cards to my desktop.
4) I then moved those V-Cards into Entourage (Yes I hate this application but it has public folder support which is required for our company) to add them to our company’s Contacts public folders.
5) After they were uploaded into our public folders, I went to the user’s machine and dragged them from the public folder contact file to their own personal contact group.
6) Finally, I verified that each user could send an email to a deal with the new contact files that were just imported.

These are the steps I took to help with this issue. Our company has about 70 active deals, so exporting these was well worth the effort. We are emailing and tracking within most of these deals each day these automated address have already proved to be a huge time saver.

Hopefully someone else can find this helpful.

Thanks.