What is a good program for keeping and developing a contacts database ?
That’s a can of worms…
I’ve used Microsoft Access to keep track of contacts/call lists, etc. With Access you can track the time between contacts, etc, etc. But, there’s a lot of time to design/build/populate/maintain.
I’ve looked into other systems as well, like phpGroupware, and we’re currently using a pretty solid and robust project/contact/billing management system called ProjectOpen.
Really though, it would be interesting to hear what everyone’s using!
outlook does a pretty good job of it mate
yeah. i dont look beyond outlook much. it does what i need
yeah outlook is pretty good for that stuff.
Once you get paste the whole anti microsoft that floats around alot of nerds its actually a pretty decent program 
We are currently using Outlook - another company near us uses Time and Chaos which has alot more to it but I’m not fussed on it though.
Can Outlook work on a network, by that I mean - can it update on several machines on a network so that each person has the same contact info/diary information etc…?
Yes, but only if your running an exchange server
Whats an exchange server ?
In short its Microsofts mail server software.
Linky Linky
http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/evaluation/default.mspx