What's the best way to do this - Business cards and duplicate contacts
We go to several conferences a year and will typically collect 100+ business cards at each event. Many of the people will be contacts that are already in the system, while others will be brand new. We have a business card scanner that works well. When scanning the cards I can batch add notes and categories, so I typically will add a generic note like "met at such and such conference January 2011". The contacts are then synced to Outlook and imported into Zoho. This works great for new contacts, but duplicates are a problem.
Ideally I'd like when importing a duplicate contact for it to recognize that a contact already exists in Zoho (presumable by matching up email address) and then give me the option to update the contact with the new card info. I'd also like a way to append my notes to the existing notes so that I maintain a running log of the last time we had contact with the person.
I don't think this ideal solution is possible just yet, but any ideas for creative workarounds that don't involve manually entering hundreds of cards a month?