Contacts- CRM Functions

[donnyposner]

I absolutely love this collaboration client.

The one feature I'd like to see most is a Shared Address Book for Contacts with CRM functions.
CRM functions would allow it to be used for many business purposes along with academic.

I'd be willing to consider funding this particular function. If you'd like to take me up on the offer, please
email me at biotrek@ca.rr.com and add Collanos in the Subject.

Thanks

[Franco Dal Molin]

Thank you for your feedback and offer. I am going to write you separately by email.

Two key functionality areas will be addressed in the coming releases: Calendaring / Task Management and Contacts Management.

Our vision for the Contacts Management features is to tie together the many sources of contacts that you already use, consolidating your existing identities and resources, including IM names, social networks, email contacts etc. We don't want to reinvent the wheel (e.g. by trying to create a monster user profile with all kinds of details), but rather be a flexible tool to aggregate, (re-)combine, and organize contacts. Your contacts are really general-purpose resources and will be available to you in Collanos Workplace, Collanos Phone and possibly other applications. Each user will of course always be in control what to do with his/her contacts, what to share, etc.

In your post you mentioned CRM functions. It would be very interesting to hear a bit more about what you actually envision. For instance, what needs do you have? In what particular ways do you intend to use such additions? And what would make us different from a specialized CRM package? Etc. If you can elaborate a bit around these questions, that would help us greatly.

Feel free to post here, but we can also continue by email. Thanks.

[BarefootStew]

We'd like some basic CRM too, for sure. However, many of our customers are in Africa, so we'd need a more recently mentioned topic, web-based collaboration sites, to be available, as 50Mb downloads are pretty difficult for your average African business.

Our wishlist for CRM would include nominating a given document (pdf, xls, whatever) as an invoice, so we could track its status (request received, quotation given, purchase order received / quotation accepted, deposit paid, work/production started, work complete, full payment received, work/product shipped, work/product delivered, delivery confirmed / order closed). Or maybe make an Order object with the above status points, to which we attach the invoice document.

This would be handy for our customers to know where their order is at, to complain when we are slow, and have easy access to all required documents (which we do now for Western clients who can download the 50Mb, including jointly edited specs, photos, invoices, etc), and it would help us track how fast we delivered orders, and keep on top of things. We can do some of this now by ensuring the first word of a Task name is Order - so-and-so, and putting the status checkpoints in the description, but once we build up lots of orders, it's hard to know what order is at what stage, so we create folders to sort them. You're invited to have a look if you want.

We could also possibly contribute towards some costs involved (stewartc@barefootpower.com for further contact).