September 29, 1999 Web posted at: 11:47 a.m. EDT (1547 GMT) by Mark Gibbs

From...

(IDG) -- Sharing information with a remote co-worker is complicated. There are a gazillion data types and something always seems to go wrong. Either your co-worker got a different version of the software you're using or you've sent a file with the wrong format or the wrong options set ... there seems to be an endless list of snafus that can get in the way.

While I don't have a general solution for this sorry state of affairs (didn't mean to get your hopes up), there is a solution for a specific problem: Transferring contact data.

How often have you needed to send someone's details to a co-worker? Happens all the time, and because it isn't easy (we either have to type in the details or do a cut and paste from multiple fields), we usually send the minimum amount of information.

A much better way is to use products that use the vCard standard. VCards are structured blocks of text data that provide what is more or less an electronic business card. The data can include name, addresses, telephone numbers (home, business, fax, pager, cellular, ISDN, voice, data, video), e-mail addresses and related Internet URLs.

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VCards can also include graphics and multimedia, including photographs, company logos, audio clips (think of the advantage of being able to hear how to pronounce the name on the vCard), along with geographic and time-zone information. VCards are designed to support multiple languages and are transport and operating system independent.

The vCard standard has been around since 1996 (an Internet lifetime ago) and the current version, Version 3.0, is specified by the IETF in two parts: RFC 2425, MIME Content-Type for Directory Information, and RFC 2426, vCard MIME Directory Profile.

The caretaker of the vCard specification is the Internet Mail Consortium (www.imc.org), an industry organization whose members are primarily Internet mail software vendors in many parts of the market. The IMC's membership includes many of the big hitters, including America Online, Hewlett-Packard, IBM/Lotus, Microsoft, Nokia, Qualcomm and Sun.

So what actually is a vCard? As we said, it is a block of text data that starts with a vCard Delimiter . . .

. . . and is terminated with either the logical end of the data stream or the appearance of the End vCard Delimiter as the first character on a line:

The properties of a vCard are defined as follows: PropertyName [';' PropertyParameters] ':' PropertyValue.

For example, names are identified by the property name N. The property value is a concatenation of the Family Name (first field), Given Name (second field), Additional Names (third field), Name Prefix (fourth field) and Name Suffix (fifth field) strings. The following is an example of the Name property for a person:

There are many types of properties defined, including formatted names ("FN") that show how the name is to be displayed, photograph ("PHOTO") that can be a URL or the actual image in any of several encodings, birth date ("BDAY") and so on.

You'll find the vCard standard carries some weight in the market and the list of products that use vCards is impressive. Microsoft's Outlook is one of the most widely used products that supports vCard, and you can drag-and-drop vCards from e-mail messages to the contacts database and vice versa.

One of the nice consequences of the simplicity of the standard is that if you send a vCard to a user that doesn't have vCard support, he will simply see a block of structured text with all the information he needs.

Ensuring that your organization uses applications that support the vCard standard is an easy way to guarantee that information about contacts is easily and reliably transferred. Great. That just leaves a gazillion minus one types of data to deal with.