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OC Birthday Reminder Console

Open Contacts provides a Search Birthday function as you knew. With the search results, you may view details or send Emails. If you need to frequently handle birthday businesses, it might be good this Search Birthday function can run regularly and automatically.

OC Birthday Reminder Console is a companion tool of Open Contacts that can regularly remind you the birthdays of your contacts. Its reminder services along with Open Contacts can be integrated will Windows' Scheduled Tasks, or any other schedule programs you like. This program is distributed as freeware. Another companion tool that can remind you is OC Birthday Reminder Helper.

Basically, OC Birthday Reminder is a set of Windows scripts that can launch Open Contacts and call its Search Birthday functions. The advantage of Windows scripts to be integrated with Windows Schedule is that the program do not need to consume system resources until it needs to remind you.

The scripts include two files: RunOcForBirthday.bat and OcForBirthday.vbs.

RunOcForBirthdays.bat

"C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Desktop\open contacts.lnk"

cscript OcForBirthdays.vbs "%1"

The BAT file expects one parameter. The valid parameter will be one of below:

  • thisweek
  • nextweek
  • thismonth
  • nextmonth
  • today
  • tomorrow
     

To show birthdays this week, you may run command line like

RunOcForBirthdays.bat thisweek

The first statement in the BAT file runs a shortcut to Open Contacts. The location of shortcut of your computer might be different from the one shown above. A shortcut of Open Contacts includes the Target location of the program, and the Start-in location of the data. You may right click a shortcut to find out the location of the shortcut. The file name of the shortcut is normally "Open Contacts.lnk".

The second statement runs VB script file "OcForBirthday.vbs" that will call functions of Open Contacts.
 

OcForBirthdays.vbs

call okmain

sub okmain
set obj = CreateObject("OpenContacts.SimpleContacts")

if obj.SearchBirthdays(wscript.arguments(0) ) = 0 then
obj.MinimizeOC
end if

end sub

Valid parameters of function SearchBirthdays are:

  • thisweek
  • nextweek
  • thismonth
  • nextmonth
  • today
  • tomorrow

The parameter is feed by the BAT file.

Birthday Reminder in Action

There are a few ways of running RunOcForBirthdays.bat.

1. If you start computer every morning, you may want to add a shortcut of the BAT file to to the Startup menu.

2. If you keep your computer running 7X24, you may want to add the BAT file to Windows' Scheduled Tasks located in Control Panel. After selecting the program which is RunOcForBirthdays.bat, you may fine-tune the schedule.

Download

OcBirthdayReminder.zip

Notes: The Birthday Reminder works with Open Contacts v3.8.2 or above.

System Requirements

Windows 2000/XP/2003, Open Contacts v3.8.2 or above.

Installation

  1. Ensure that Open Contacts v3.8.2 or above is installed.
  2. Extract 2 script files from the zip file to anywhere you want.
  3. Modify the BAT file for correct shortcut LNK file using any text editor.
  4. Run the BAT file for testing with one of the valid parameters.
  5. Associate the bat file with your favorite schedule program.

Tips:

You may right-click on the BAT file, and click "Edit" menu item.

Troubleshooting

In most computers, the Reminder program will just work right away. However, if your computer has strict security settings or anti-virus software blocking the running of VB scripts, you might need to adjust those settings accordingly. Please ask your local IT support personals for assistant.

Microsoft VB script engine use "VBS" as default file extension name. If the file association of "VBS" extension had been changed by other program, you might need to claim the association back to VB script engine. Please following one way of doing so:

1. Run RegEdit.

2. Locate key HKEY_CLASS_ROOT\.vbs, and the default value should be VBSFile.

If you don't understand Windows registry and RegEdit, please seek assistant from your local IT supports.

Remarks

  • The Search Birthday function of Open Contacts may handle the situations of leap year. When searching for "this month" or "next month", you should leave the day count to 31 always for a leap month.
  • Open Contacts supports recording a birthday without defining the year. For example, Alice White's birthday is 21st of April, you may then write down the birthday as 04-21. When searching people born in April, Alice will be listed, however, the age will not be calculated consequently.