Work on your relationships: these 12 high-powered contact managers offer an effortless means of maintaining business relationships - includes a related article describing the Best Buys - Software Review - Evaluation

Home Office Computing, Feb, 1994 by Charles H. Gajeway

YOU'RE JUST ABOUT TO KNOCK OFF FOR THE DAY WHEN the phone rings. "Mr. Jones, this is John Hill. I called you two months ago. Do you have that estimate yet?" Now you're in trouble. You pull down notes stuck to your shelves and rifle through a carton of wrinkled faxes-desperately trying to remember what it was Mr. Hill wanted you to estimate. You need to find your notepad. You need to put Mr. Hill on hold. You need a miracle. What you need is contact-management software. Software aimed at organizing relatively loose information falls into two categories: personal information managers (PIMs) and contact managers. Generally, PIMs tend to be simpler and more free-form in nature, focused primarily on scheduling and recording the activities of a single individual. Contact managers, on the other hand, deal with categorizing business relationships and tend to be more oriented toward retrieving, reshuffling, and presenting vast amounts of information in a variety of ways.

Hands-On Concerns For this review, we looked at a dozen contact managers for Windows, Mac, and DOS. Our primary focus is on Windows- and Mac-based programs, but one DOS program (Act! for DOS) was submitted for evaluation by the publisher. The scope of programs ranges from simple applications (such as SuperOffice Lite and DateBook/TouchBase Pro) that sell for less than $100 to feature-laden $300 behemoths (like Act! and Commence) that are clearly intended for sophisticated and demanding users. An important concern in evaluation is ease of data gathering and manipulation: Programs should provide default entries and pick lists that present commonly used entries in a pop-up menu to reduce keystrokes; automatic formatting of dates and phone numbers is also a plus.

Search capabilities are critical. A contact manager is a database, so it should be a simple matter to look up a client's name, find every occurrence of a particular word (baseball or economics, for example) in a note field, or use combinations of Boolean logic (try, sex=male AND age [is greater than] 45 AND state=CA OR state=NY) to create a highly targeted mailing list.

Since prompt and accurate written communications are a vital part of managing business relationships, being able to link data to your word processor is important. Some programs, like Act! and Maximizer, offer convenient internal editors that automatically position the name, address, date, salutation, and closing in all correspondence. Others, like SuperOffice, provide links to popular word processors. A few, like InTouch, leave it all up to you.

Last but not least, speed of operation and ease of use are particularly critical in evaluating contact managers. If you're on the phone with a client or supplier, your frustration will rise and your productivity will drop if you are forced to wait for the program to respond to your queries.

Who Needs It? Just about every businessperson needs some kind of contact-management system, even if it's only a Rolodex or a to-do list. You need to establish and develop relationships with customers, suppliers, advisers, and perhaps even employees, and the more methodical and informed you are about these contacts, the better and more easily you can do this aspect of your job.

Not everyone has the same requirements or expectations of contact-management systems. If you run a business where you perform a defined service for a specific set of clients on a regularly scheduled basis (such as lawn maintenance, piano tuning, bookkeeping/accounting, and so forth), your needs will be relatively light--primarily simple scheduling and tracking of services performed. In this case, a low-end program with only a few sophisticated features may be just the ticket.

But if your business involves a more complex, irregularly scheduled process that requires obtaining materials or information from third parties (such as preparing market research reports, interior decorating, or computer consulting), your contact-management needs will be much more intense. With a larger number of contacts that fall into different groups, your Scheduling needs will be more complex, you'll need to generate more correspondence, and you will have to do more prospecting and marketing in order to generate a steady stream of business.

In this situation, you need all the performance and features you can get in order to stay on top. The higher cost and steeper learning curve of a more full-featured program will be paid back quickly, however, with a more efficient means of retrieving data and handling complex tasks.

Act!

Rating: * * * *

WIN/DOS/MAC

Act! offers an encyclopedic list of features, a user interface that is uncluttered and logically organized, and a tutorial that will have you off and running in record time. Each contact record is contained in two screens with a total of 74 fields--16 of which you can define.

To simplify data entry, Act! makes extensive use of editable pick lists (pop-up shortcut menus), which can be assigned to any field. In addition, phone numbers, dates, and times are automatically formatted so that you only have to enter the figures. When entering new contacts that share data, you can copy the needed information either from fields defined as primary or from all fields.