J
johnhood
Hello folks,
I spent part of the weekend combing for something to replace Tahoe
Contact Manager for sales prospecting and Customer Relationship
Management (or CRM). Hey! It's COLD in Milwaukee!
Many people recommended contact managers in this NG when I asked and all
the suggestions were good for general contact tracking and PIM (the best
ones seemed to be Ecco Pro, Palm Desktop and Sidekick). While these
were excellent suggestions, none of them specifically handled the very
particular needs of a sales person.
After several hours of searching, I was able to come up with an app
called Regi, which, while a bit minimal, is the best thing I could find
for CRM-like data tracking. Here's the link - www.FrontNet.com/regi.html
I have one still undone, something called Ascent, the download link went
nowhere. I've told them about it, I'll post the results if anyone's
interested.
Warning - Rant below.
I can recommend that you AVOID two of them. So here they are, from John
's Best of Freeware (drum roll please):
The Contact Managers I wouldn't waste my time on.
CrMader - No uninstall. No Help or manual. Impossible to figure out
how to relate the various fields to each other. Error messages and help
tips aren't in English.
Radix - This is nothing more than a MySQL frontend, which they don't
tell you. But wait! The MYSQL componants install along with the
application, so that's OK right? Nope, you have to figure out how to
get MYSQL server started. No help from the Radix documentation there.
But wait, once you get it started Radix includes a nifty database
manager and creator so you can get the database part going, right?
Nope. The database manager won't permit the use of the root account for
MYSQL and none of the Radix database defaults are documented.
Basically in order to evaluate the software you have to know enough or
learn enough MYSQL to set it up (and how many sales people are going to
do that?), or pay a consultant to set it up for you - just to look at it.
I've been doing computers since the DOS days. I get paid to do
troubleshooting. After working on this for four hours, I still couldn't
get it to work. Some knob thought that this was a way to get people
interested in their software. Yeah, OK.
End of rant -
Anyway, that's the scoop folks. I hope this helps. Check out Regi, and
let us know what you think.
Regards,
John H.
John's Best of Freeware http://home.wi.rr.com/johnhood/freeware/
I spent part of the weekend combing for something to replace Tahoe
Contact Manager for sales prospecting and Customer Relationship
Management (or CRM). Hey! It's COLD in Milwaukee!
Many people recommended contact managers in this NG when I asked and all
the suggestions were good for general contact tracking and PIM (the best
ones seemed to be Ecco Pro, Palm Desktop and Sidekick). While these
were excellent suggestions, none of them specifically handled the very
particular needs of a sales person.
After several hours of searching, I was able to come up with an app
called Regi, which, while a bit minimal, is the best thing I could find
for CRM-like data tracking. Here's the link - www.FrontNet.com/regi.html
I have one still undone, something called Ascent, the download link went
nowhere. I've told them about it, I'll post the results if anyone's
interested.
Warning - Rant below.
I can recommend that you AVOID two of them. So here they are, from John
's Best of Freeware (drum roll please):
The Contact Managers I wouldn't waste my time on.
CrMader - No uninstall. No Help or manual. Impossible to figure out
how to relate the various fields to each other. Error messages and help
tips aren't in English.
Radix - This is nothing more than a MySQL frontend, which they don't
tell you. But wait! The MYSQL componants install along with the
application, so that's OK right? Nope, you have to figure out how to
get MYSQL server started. No help from the Radix documentation there.
But wait, once you get it started Radix includes a nifty database
manager and creator so you can get the database part going, right?
Nope. The database manager won't permit the use of the root account for
MYSQL and none of the Radix database defaults are documented.
Basically in order to evaluate the software you have to know enough or
learn enough MYSQL to set it up (and how many sales people are going to
do that?), or pay a consultant to set it up for you - just to look at it.
I've been doing computers since the DOS days. I get paid to do
troubleshooting. After working on this for four hours, I still couldn't
get it to work. Some knob thought that this was a way to get people
interested in their software. Yeah, OK.
End of rant -
Anyway, that's the scoop folks. I hope this helps. Check out Regi, and
let us know what you think.
Regards,
John H.
John's Best of Freeware http://home.wi.rr.com/johnhood/freeware/