One recent project (mid 2005) was to investigate CRM applications for the Mac environment. At the time I only found about 3 and Daylite from Marketcircle was by far the best. What makes it better is the tight integration between the core system and the mail, calendar etc. (PIM). In my view sync needs to be 2 way but the latest version has improved these functions.
In the non Mac world this has been a key painpoint and struggle for many years with third party developers bridging the gap on many crm apps.
Now that many corporate managers are asking for, and getting Macs as their regular work machine – applications like Daylite will be high on the list to try out. I’ve seen a number of users try the dual partition environment so they can use OSX and view their Windows space. As a comfort factor and as a way to leverage their investment in previous software this makes sense but increasingly native Mac applications will take over.
In a very time short time “business applications for the Mac” won’t be the oxymoron it was when I started looking.
In a product review column at mymac is a review of the latest version (V.3.1) by John Martellaro. He gives Daylite 5 out of 5. A quote from him.
If you work in an intensive, collaborative environment, especially project management, sales or customer support, you need to keep track of who you talked to, important information about them, what was said, and what’s next. Daylite, with very little up-front learning curve, allows you to manage all that complex information. That includes dropping Apple’s Mail application e-mails into a searchable relational database.But more importantly, Daylite 3 is very cool, extremely pleasing to the eye, well designed, a joy to use, and solid in its functionality. Even if you’re working alone, Daylite 3 will help you manage all the information that’s generated by meetings, Websites, e-mail and phone calls and help you organize your work.
If all this reminds you of SoHo Notes (which uses the same database), Daylite is similar in functionality, but appears to me to be more organized towards the specific goal of time, contact and project management. SoHo Notes, seems to me to be more of a information manager specializing in different kinds/formats of information with some added alarm clock features. I am a registered user of both, and I prefer to use Daylite for project and customer management and SoHo Notes for the organization of technical data related to my writing career.”
Enough said – what is your experience?
