J
John H.
Keywords: Act Goldmine Tahoe free equivalant replacement.
John H. posting from work.
Last night I was digging around looking for a contact manager with
history again. This time, my wife needed it for work. Here is what I
found:
There aren't that many available for small businesses and I found out
why. I've been looking in the wrong place: Most office products which
include a database, will have this feature as a template or a Wizard
that the user can build themselves.
Not free (but included if you have it) - Microsoft Access under File,
New, the "Databases" tab, you will find a contact manager. Follow the
wizard through the setup, and bingo, you're done. Setup time - 15
minutes.
Free Nagware - IIRC EasyOffice has a contact manager with history and
notes as part of the base install. Setup time - 0 minutes. No wizard,
because it's already set up.
Open Source - OpenOffice 2.0 Base - Ok so it doesn't have a full
database Wizard, but the table Wizard has "Customers" and "Tasks" that
will build these tables for you, and the Form Wizard will build you a
customers form with subform for the task history. Query Wizard and
Report Wizard should be just as easy. Setup time - 45 minutes. I
still have more to do with the reports but at least I can enter data.
Conclusion - I've had a harder time doing an Excel spreadsheet. These
are easy, and you own them (more or less).
John
www.jhoodsoft.org
John H. posting from work.
Last night I was digging around looking for a contact manager with
history again. This time, my wife needed it for work. Here is what I
found:
There aren't that many available for small businesses and I found out
why. I've been looking in the wrong place: Most office products which
include a database, will have this feature as a template or a Wizard
that the user can build themselves.
Not free (but included if you have it) - Microsoft Access under File,
New, the "Databases" tab, you will find a contact manager. Follow the
wizard through the setup, and bingo, you're done. Setup time - 15
minutes.
Free Nagware - IIRC EasyOffice has a contact manager with history and
notes as part of the base install. Setup time - 0 minutes. No wizard,
because it's already set up.
Open Source - OpenOffice 2.0 Base - Ok so it doesn't have a full
database Wizard, but the table Wizard has "Customers" and "Tasks" that
will build these tables for you, and the Form Wizard will build you a
customers form with subform for the task history. Query Wizard and
Report Wizard should be just as easy. Setup time - 45 minutes. I
still have more to do with the reports but at least I can enter data.
Conclusion - I've had a harder time doing an Excel spreadsheet. These
are easy, and you own them (more or less).
John
www.jhoodsoft.org