Arne Hess at the::unwired has written a thought provoking post, one which asks questions that I have myself wondered, yet was too lazy to post about.

He says, “Outlook has many fields for contact details, like Assistant phone number (very useful), Business Fax, Home Fax, Other Fax (three fax number fields? ), Pager (who is using a Pager today), Primary and Radio (what ever it is) and even Telex (though the last Telex was disconnected in the late 80s in the last century) but Outlook 2007 has just one field for mobile numbers! I’m not going to say that all the previously mentioned fields doesn’t make any sense anymore today but please – why just one Mobile field after Microsoft just recently introduced its new Outlook 2007, Exchange 2007 and Windows Mobile 6? Wouldn’t it be the perfect timing to introduce new fields?”

Seriously. How many times have you gone to enter someone’s info in Outlook (or your WM device), only to find that it didn’t fit in the provided fields. What I would personally like to see would be one or two user-editable fields – for oddball things like lock combinations or key-codes that are easier kept in the Contacts area, but I realize that that might be asking too much.

So Arne asks, “How about you? Are your business contacts, friend and family members carrying more then one mobile phone only and how do you add more then one mobile phone number to your Outlook? Do you also think Outlook 2007+ should better have new fields since the fields above are not representing today’s world of communication anymore?”

Maybe it is time for us to let Microsoft know that we need new data fields. You can read all of Arne’s post here.

Thanks for the tip Jason.