Which CRM ? Which Email Client?

[Talal Itani]

Hello,

I have been using Outlook Express for years. It is fast, simple, and
clean. Now I need a CRM software, but the ones I looked at integrate with
Outlook (not express). Outlook (not express) is confusing. I do not know
what I should do. Is Outlook 2007 much better than it's predecessor? I am
contemplating salesforce.com, ACT, Goldmine, Miaximzer. I hate to download
them, then spend the time to learn them, in order to find out which best
suits meets my needs. Please share your thoughts with me. Thank you very
much.

Best Regards,
T.I.

 

[Doug Castell]

GoldMine is a program that runs on (and stores it's data on) your computer.

Salesforce runs in a web browser and your data sits on someone else's
server -- and you pay for this every month.

GoldMine has a great e-mail client. It doesn't use Outlook. When you send
or receive an e-mail to/from a contact, you can see it in your inbox but you
can aslo review e-mail history right on the contact's record. If you have
multiple users, you can all see one another's e-mails with that client as
well.

Check this out:
http://www.frontrange.com/common/files/downloads/productdemos/smrm_demos/demo/default.htm

Gives you an overview (with a lot of marketing fluff, unfortunately) of
GoldMine features without you having to download and install a demo at
least.

--
Doug Castell
Castell Computers
Los Angeles, CA
(310)601-4738
http://www.castellcomputers.com
^^^ Tips, tricks, tutorials, how-to's etc. on GoldMine and surrounding
technologies.

 

[Steve Best]

I would beg to differ with Doug (for once!!)

The Goldmine email client is probably the worst I've ever seen.

The interface leaves alot to be desired in terms of visuals and seems too
cluttered to me.
My main gripe is that it's HTML rendering is absolutely awful. I have found
countless email templates to break entirely in Goldmine yet work in every
modern web browser and other email client. I have no end of problems
getting simple HTML functionality to behave correctly in Goldmine and the
way it strips out stuff it doesn't understand is just beyond me!!! HTML
interpreters and parsers are deliberately written to ignore or regurgitate
stuff it doesn't understand (i.e. tags which aren't supported or are
deprecated) but Goldmine decides to physically strip these from the actual
code.

If you are only interested in plaintext emails, then it's quite capable but
for HTML and rich emails, I'd stay well away.

However that said, in terms of mailshots and such like, Goldmine does
provide quite a powerful system to send an email to multiple recipients
based on some criteria or simple send to a group i.e. Christmas eCard list.
Also the auto-filing of your emails so you can track communication with
particular customers or contacts is very good, if a little confusing.

However I still dislike the way Goldmine tries to handle email templates
exactly the same as document templates (i.e. word, excel etc). You often
find yourself overwriting an existing template without realising it.

Goldmine does however integrate somewhat with Outlook (not outlook express)
so you can actually use Goldmine along with Outlook if you prefer.

Steve.

 

[Doug Castell]

One tip on your doc management center thing with accidentally overwriting
templates and such.. Refresh the left side of the doc management center
often -- whenever you make a new template or delete one, etc. You'll see
the benefit.

--
Doug Castell
Castell Computers
Los Angeles, CA
(310)601-4738
http://www.castellcomputers.com
^^^ Tips, tricks, tutorials, how-to's etc. on GoldMine and surrounding
technologies.