BEST CONTACT MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE?

Different products have different strong points. What features are most important to you? Personally, I think Outlook Express is the WORST choice of the options you listed. Outlook, on the other hand is a pretty useful product. ACT has a very strong reputation. I use Outlook on my PCs and Beyond Contacts on my PDA. Beyond Contacts holds ALL of the Outlook fields, so my data is consistant and portable. I have 867 entries in my Outlook contacts list. Just remember that even the best software is only as good as your consistancy in using it.

It all depends on what you want to do. First let's define our terms...

A Personal Information Manager (PIM) keeps up with things like phone numbers, addresses, email addresses, personal calendar and notes. Basically your Franklin(tm) Planner kind of things.

Contact Management Software does that and more. Contact management software allows you to keep all the information on a given contact (let's assume business for now) grouped and easy to search. You can keep notes of each phone call, sale, email, etc. all under one listing. Bill calls, you pull up his record and it shows you the last call you had with him, what emails you have been sending back and forth as well as all his contact information. Or, on Tuesday you look at your calendar and see you have a follow-up call with Bill that you made last week. Click on it and you get the history leading up to this call.

Outlook is not really very good as a contact manager as there is not a good way to set automatic follow-ups, emails, etc. It is, however a pretty good Personal Information Manager as it does track your phone book, appointment list and handle email and news groups. Even with the business content add-on it still falls way short of being a true contact manager.

ACT, Maximizer and Goldmine come to mind as better alternatives. All handle basic PIM work as well as the contact management tasks.

All three have trial versions and are worth looking at to see which one fits your way of working.

I would dismiss Excell and Yahoo Address Bool immediately if you really want Contact Management. Access is only good if you are a good programer and are basically going to write your own version of ACT or Goldmine.

Good luck

Hi, Thank you for your replies so far. I am essentially looking for Contact Management Software - something like ACT!, Goldmine, etc. I'm looking for the best product for the cheapest amount of money (Most important features are EASY TO USE, and INEXPENSIVE (I don't have much money) - Thanks so much

Point value changed by question poster.

Anybody know of any FREE CRM software? Thanks

I've not tried them, but you might take a look at Appshore.

http://www.appshore.com/?op=home.base.start

It looks like they may have what you are looking for. It's free and may work until you want something that you can work with when you don't have access to the InterNet.

jdg

Well, you are limiting yourself with cheapest and easiest. Like one poster, there are many freebies. Do you have MS Access? If so try one of their free templates. Here is a link to a contact managment database authored in Access. Pretty nice for a freebie, easy to use... and meets your financial goals... free. Check it out:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/TC010178391033.aspx?CategoryID=CT011366681033

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Have a look at SwapCard.. It was arguably the best i found... http://www.swap-card.com... They got their desktop clients which do a good work....

Virtual Filing Cabinet is by far the best contact management solution on the market. It is the only software solution I've seen thus far that integrates contact management, email management, document management, document collaboration, telephony, skype, fax management, calendar, notes, voice recording and more. It's unreal!! It is also fully integrated with Outlook so you can import all your contacts and emails from Outlook. Imagine you click on a contact and you can then access all the emails, documents, faxes, voice recordings, notes and calendar events associated to them. He he, find me a software that does that :). Enjoy

www.carmelvision.com

I bought latest version of ACT and is the worst decision I have ever made. The program does not print the report according the format it has on the screen. I called ACT and they told me they are working on solving this problem.

Not sure if you're still looking but for those that come across this article, you can also check out www.slingplan.com for online contact management.