One of my areas of expertise is in sales force automation and customer relationship
management (visit my other web site, AutomationAssistance.com for hardcore advice in this
area). I've seen and touched and implemented many different products to help large and
small companies track their contacts and sales opportunities.
Now what holds true for successful roll-outs in large corporations is also true for
successful automation of small businesses and individuals: the simpler the tool, the
better the chance that people will actually use it. I don't care how many fancy features
it has. If a tool is not first easy to use, then no one will ever touch it.
A-book from Dualitysoft
seems to agree with this overall strategy, and while you can't use their product in a
multi-user environment to share data, a small business consisting of a sales manager and a
few sales reps might actually find A-book
to be a very simple and inexpensive solution to tracking contact data.
A-book's simple and elegant screens
A-book
enables you to track contacts quickly and easily. The set-up and customization of the
program is painless and takes only a matter of minutes. Using its Explorer-like interface,
you'll be pumping in personal and business data in no time at all. You can store a wealth
of information ranging from name, address, multiple phones numbers, job and family
information, and even a photo of the person -- a feature I have always liked in the former
Janna Contact but frequently overlooked in the high-end products. You can also switch
between an advanced multi-tab, multi-screen view of this data and a simpler composite view
where all of this data is presented on a single screen. Another nice feature.
A-book enables
you to categorize your data into separate contact books. Thus you might have one for
friends, another for family, and another for professionals. A-book will minimize to
your System Tray task bar which makes it easy to use and available at a moment's notice.
vCards are also supported: you can save individual contacts as vCards and email them as
attachments -- useful for sharing data in a low-tech way among a small sales force. The
tool also provides a wealth of simple, clean reporting features that add to the overall
value of the product.
I'd like to see A-book
take the next step and develop a clean import/export feature that allows it to synchronize
up and down to a Palm PDA. As any Palm devotee knows, the Palm Desktop software stinks and
A-book would
make a nice face-lift. Of course, A-book
is screaming out for data synchronization, and whether or not A-book elects to do
this with a third party product or evolve to a web-based contact management system
(probably easier in the long-run), it would make a logical next step in the product's
evolution.
Still with its ease of use, excellent reporting features, and incredibly
low price, A-book
stands head and shoulders above better known and more costly single-user contact
management tools. If you are in the market for a tool such as this, you might download the
free trial from DualitySoft's web site before you make a purchase from
your local software store.
A-book
is supported across the Microsoft Windows platform and is only $24.95. For more
information and a free evaluation copy, please click here.
A-book
