Contact management advise!

[Wimy]

Good morning,

We are looking for a elaborate contact management prgram, for our extensive customer mailing lists (email). We have been using Entourage but it is limited in space for additional information. We would like to track what and when our customers have either enquired or purchased one of our courses. (average is 2-3 per customer)

Do we need to use FM and would it work (sync) with Entourage.

Be great to learn some feedback from a well experienced Data management community.

[primitive_man]

Hello, as one who came across this exact problem late last year with a client, let me be brutally honest and tell you that your chances of being able to integrate Entourage and FM are as close to zero as to make no difference. I wasted some 4 weeks trying to do this and in the end just decided to design my own FM pro 8 solution. The migration of the data went smoothly and the company now has a fully operational CMS FM Pro8 solution that does not rely upon Entourage, is fully user customisable and is about 10 times faster.

[David McQueen]

Good morning,

We are looking for a elaborate contact management prgram, for our extensive customer mailing lists (email). We have been using Entourage but it is limited in space for additional information. We would like to track what and when our customers have either enquired or purchased one of our courses. (average is 2-3 per customer)

Do we need to use FM and would it work (sync) with Entourage.

Be great to learn some feedback from a well experienced Data management community.

There are lots of CRM's out there done exclusively in filemaker. In terms of communication by email, the native send email scripts work fairly well and are good for light duty. For heavy duty go directly to the plug ins. I have used POP3it and SMTPit in earlier versions and they did a great job. There are also other plug ins available.

In terms of event capture, filemaker is good at this.

Go to my site and download "Little Helper" for your applicable version of FMP (It is there in 5-6 and in 7-8). It is light duty on the email side but has extensive event capture capability and scheduling capability over a work group (by individual member or in total). It will capture phone, email, fax, note and web browsing events directly from the contacts database. This will give you some ideas of what can be done. It will run for 60 days so you can play with it.

http://www.lichen-software.com

There may be others who have similar trials.

The nice thing about FMP is that it can always be altered to suit your needs as you go. So you can start off light and get heavier if this is what your business needs. Or if you find something that starts to fit the bill, but is not quite right for your particular business set up, the developer can probably alter to suit. So in that regard, it pays to look around.

I believe that going the FMP route you will eventually give up on Entourage and have everything come directly into or go out of your FMP database in one way or another.

Note that one of the stumbling blocks with earlier versions was the data limits to FMP. With FMP 7 and 8, this should not be an issue for you. This is especially true if you are just using Enourage for this purpose now.

Good luck and best regards

Dave McQueen

[Albert Harum-Alvarez]

Wimy,

You might want to take the PressFile for a spin. Use the Instant Demos at pressfile.com.

The PressFile is a contact list manager for PR folk and corporate communicators. It lets you reach thousands with a personal touch: individually addressed emails, shipping, document creation, history logging and web research on your contacts.

I humbly suggest that it may be one of the most sophisticated FileMaker solutions anywhere. There's also a web version that runs as a Flash client.

--

Albert Harum-Alvarez

Small Company

http://smallco.net

http://smallco.net/classes

http://pressfile.com

US & Canada: 877 66-Small (877 667-6255)

UK: +44 (0)20 7096 1325

International: +1 (305) 273-6096