Veerle's blog

It’s a struggle to find the right application that makes office life a bit easier. For starters I am designer and not a sales person so it’s only natural that I want to limit the amount of time being the sales person. In my search for the best application that was one of the criteria that had in mind. I’m not the kind of person that falls for features but for usability instead. After the jump you’ll find out what had a large weight in my decision-making.

I don't know if it is an obsession or not but the first thing I look at even before trying an application is the interface. The features can be easy to use but if the interface blows I'm not interested because I know myself and I will stop using it anyway. The design factor and if it doesn't look overwhelming is what will make me decide if I want to try it or not. That's where Daylite 3 draws me in.

Daylite 3

I'm already using a Marketcircle application called Billings with great satisfaction. The only thing missing in Billings is a network feature imho. I reviewed it some time ago. Anyway let's get back to Daylite. Like I said in the intro it's the well-designed interface that makes me want to try it out. When I got the chance to review it I jumped at the opportunity. As far as I know this is the best looking organisation tool for the Mac. With that out of the way let's look if it is intuitive to use as well?

Installing

The installer is usually a first indication to see if the makers care for details or not. You'll need an admin account because things are being placed in the root library. It's the heart of the application that gets installed namely OpenBase SQL, the database that the application will use. The installer keeps you informed of what's going on. Once the installing process is done and you start the application for the first time you'll be asked if you are new and would like to create a new database, connect to an existing one or if you want to connect to a sample database. I've opted to connect to the Print & Design sample database because that seemed the most logical choice and closest to what I do.

Checking out what's possible

If you explore the sample database like me you'll get a pretty good overview of what the application has to offer. I liked some the examples in the Print & Design sample, so I thought why not create a new database and set it up in a similar way.

Setting it up

When you create a new database you fill in your details and you will also get the option to import information from Address book and iCal. In step 4 you choose from which template you like to proceed. Once you've selected what you need and click finish you'll have to add your admin password to finish the import. It seemed that all my contacts and organizations are in there and the set up is like in the Print & Design sample. Daylite is a single window application, which means whatever you click or do you'll always remain in that window. We are using it in a multi-user environment but it can also operate in a single user mode. So one user is one license and from there on it's as many licenses as the number of users who will be logged into Daylite concurrently.

The main window

You'll see icons for Calendars, Contacts, Organizations, Projects, Opportunities, Groups, Tasks, Appointments and Notes. The interface doesn't look overwhelming and you don't get the feeling you sometimes have with other applications that you don't know where to start.

You'll also recognize the purple icons that represent smart filters like in the Finder. Daylite calls them source list capabilities and they are available in every category of information and you can customize them to your preference.

Syncing

The first thing I did is enabling the syncing feature in the preferences so that my contacts in Address book and iCal stay up to date. That's needed because iCal can give alerts when it's not running and Daylite can't. It's important that you start out right or you rip your hair out like me. This syncing is complex and you can screw up pretty quickly. I’ve ruined all my contacts and organisations with doubles when trying to sync with the local iCal and Address Book on my Mac that wasn’t the master database. Eventually I've turned off syncing with iCal and Address book on my Mac because I was afraid things would go haywire again. On the master Mac the syncing with iCal and Address book works flawlessly. I think it's best to start from one Mac that has the correct Address book records and make that Mac the master and on the others start fresh with no data so during the first sync data will flow over. The more machines for syncing the higher risk that something can go wrong I suppose.

Calendars

Calendars are a visual representation of appointments, meetings, and events based on the criteria you determine (i.e., users, category, kind). Calendars and appointments play an integral role in managing schedules. Daylite features 3 different ways to view your calendar: day, week, and month. A handy feature that you can toggle in the calendar view is the due list pane. Daylite adjust the due list according to the date range that you are currently viewing in your calendar.

Contacts

The concept of contacts is easy to understand as it represents a person or individual. That can be someone you know personally, a customer or a business lead. You can take this as far as you want in what is stored there. You can put in date of birth, middle name, hobbies, phone number, electronic address, and many more. What I like about it is that you can create notes and keep a chronological record of your interaction with a contact. If you send a letter to a contact in your database, Daylite stores a link to the letter in the Details panes Activity tab of your contact record. You can also add files and URL's to a contact as file references and web references respectively. You have flexibility in classifying contacts by assigning a category and single or multiple keywords. For example, a contact can have a category 'client' and keywords such as 'loyal client' or 'long term client.' This way you arrange your contacts into meaningful groups when your database gets bigger.

Organizations

An organization could be a company, business, family, association, or any legal entity comprised of a collection of contacts. It enables you to manage information and relationships specific to the company or from a company perspective. You also have a number of fields that you can use such as size of the company, ticker symbol, industry, region, employee hierarchy, the company's affiliates, and many more. When you start linking a person to that organization you understand the role of that person in that organization. For example you tag someone as a 'Decision Maker'. Just as in Contacts you can link notes or files from hard drive to keep as reference to that organizations (invoices for example).

Projects

The Projects part isn't something I used all the time because we use Basecamp as well for communicating with clients about their projects. As far as I am aware of there is no support for Basecamp inside Daylite. It would be nice if they took advantage of the Basecamp API and let you import the things that you have online. Not everything should be possible but it would be nice if there was a collaboration between the two. However if you aren't using Basecamp the Projects part can be helpful. It does what you would expect like planning, keeping track of relevant information that help manage the multiple objectives in team or on individual basis. A project has many fields that record the status, due date, start date, completed date, pipeline, objective, and owner of the project. Daylite allows you to guesstimate how much time a project might take for completion. This helps you to compare whether your calculations are realistic or that they need improvement. Here you also have categories and meaningful keywords at your disposal. I use things like 'website design' or 'logo design' so I can filter out projects. The pipeline feature is handy because you can visually track how a project is organized. This way we can easily see what stage the project is in.

Opportunities

Opportunities is one of the features that we really needed because before Daylite we didn't track any of the pile of requests we get. So we had no real clue how many opportunities became real projects. Everything was just guesswork :) Now we can put in a forecasted close, reason why we didn't won, percentage of the probability of winning etc. Opportunities are a potential for new business. When you create a new opportunity, you can record the state, type, category, keywords, owner, and much other information. I have set this up so that my services that have a flat rate are stored in there. This way it's fast to send out an estimate to Billings. We also use the pipeline feature here to track the sales cycle. We have several categories like GUI design, templates, branding + identity that we use to differentiate the different opportunities. Opportunities can be linked to contacts, organizations, groups, tasks, appointments, and notes in your database.

Groups

A group is a collection of contacts, organizations, projects, and/or opportunities that have something in common, as defined by you. You could use Groups to send out an offer to a bunch of organizations or contacts. Groups can also have any number of subgroups. That make it possible to organize responses from those you have campaigned to.

Tasks

We all have work that we want to accomplish. Some days are busier than others. In Daylite, you can create tasks to maintain a record of what work needs to be completed within a certain time frame. For example a quote that has to be sent out by Friday. When you create a task, you can record information such as start date, complete date, due date, estimated time, category, etc.

Appointments

Appointments are there to remind you that you agreed to do something at a certain time on a specific date. If you have appointments that span multiple days (such as a conference or seminar), you could use the multi-day event feature to create a banner in your calendar. Typically, you would create appointments for your contacts, however, in Daylite, you can also create appointments that are linked to projects and opportunities for giving them a more powerful context. For example all my invoice due dates are in there as events so we can follow up payments. One thing to remember for this to work is that Daylite must be running when you create the invoice in Billings. The appointment window records many specifications about where, when, how, and with whom the appointment will occur. For those who travel on business, Daylite gives you the ability to customize time zone by matching the default system time or select a different time zone than that used by your computer for creating appointments. You can create many kinds of appointments such as event, outbound call, inbound call, chat, meeting, and video. When you link other users to an appointment, it becomes a meeting; Daylite notifies all the linked users about the meeting through the Notifications window. Before you actually create a meeting, you could use the Schedule button to determine conflicts between the users linked to it. If you have appointments that are repetitive, you can repeat them either daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly until you reach a finish date. However setting up a recurring alarm endlessly is not as easy as in iCal because Daylite wants you to give in an end date and there is no option to choose never like in iCal.

Notes

A note is a brief record of information that can be created on its own or linked to a contact, organization, project, opportunity, or group in your database. This allows you to attach the full power of Daylite's linking and tracking capability to your small bits of information. Notes are ideal for bits of data that don't fit anywhere, but are still important and can't be lost—for example, a contact's history. You can assign a category to the note which is useful for filtering Smart lists or performing quick searches. If you are using Daylite Mail Integration (DMI), the contents of an email can be stored in Daylite as a note and linked to the appropriate contact. Ideal for storing stuff that you have agreed (like price or a deadline) on and that you want to keep around for when there is a discusion and want to prove it in black and white :) In a multi-user environment, Daylite gives you the ability to customize the visibility of notes. For instance, a supervisor can create a private note for a public contact record, so that only he can access and modify the note.

Trash

A very useful addition to the application is called Trash. Let's imagine that I put in a project and my colleague Geert deletes it together with all contacts on his end. Luckily it is not lost forever because under the menu 'window' you'll find Trash. Trash is the place where you can check what has been deleted by who and when and easily restore it. You can restore any item you delete in Daylite, as long as it is available in the Trash window. If you delete an item in the Trash window permanently, you cannot restore it back into Daylite. It's a good extra security because the more people have access the higher the risk something will go wrong eventually.

Concluding

The truth is that Daylite is one of the best CRM applications that I found so far, but to be honest it still is a complex application. I fully understand the complexity to create something that pleases everyone because everyone has different needs. Still when I first start using it, I was very impressed but after a few weeks I sometimes got baffled by the complexity. It strokes a bit with the philosophy of the application if you need to hire professional training to fully take advantage of it. Much could be approved by creating some example videos that explain features like projects, opportunities for example. There are videos but they stay too much on the surface of things you find out yourself. I would set up a fake graphic design agency and show the user how it would work in a day to day basis to fully utilize the features found in the application. It wouldn't have to be complicated just show the feature how it would be used so that you grasp the beginnings. If you still want more after that than it would make sense to hire pro help. I believe many more users could be convinced this way to use Daylite. The investment in time would be worth it I believe.

There are a few things that don't really work as they should imho. The first one is when you create a new contact in Daylite. You can watch the movie (QuickTime) below to see what I mean exactly.

Example movie of adding a contact

As you have seen it's hard to get out of that box because there is no visual indication that there is a way of cancelling the action. I hear some of you thinking why not just use the 'escape' button? I did try that and the funny thing is that this doesn't cancel the action as you would think but act as an enter instead. So when you do that you end up with a new organization again.

Another one is when you try to use Daylite together with Billings. For example: I want to add a client in Billings using Daylite. So I click the Add client button and in the dropdown I choose 'From Daylite'. In the search field I enter the company name and as a result I either get nothing (if there are no contact persons connected to this organisation) or I get the contacts listed. That's not what I want, I want to add the organization, not its contacts, since you don't invoice contacts, but the organization, in other words legal entities (e.g. I invoice Nike, and not John who is the VP of Operations of Nike). Now I'm forced to go via Address book, but there I want to avoid to use the checkbox to mark a vcard as a company. This behaviour makes the 'From Daylite' import option useless for me in Billings. I now avoid this by adding companies and persons separately in Address book. The organisations are there in Daylite so I'm baffled why you can't add them in Billings and I hope this gets fixed in an update.

In closing even with the complexity and the annoyances it still is one of the best CRM applications for Mac. For the time being I am sticking with it and I am hoping that most of these will be fixed in a 4.0 version and that Marketcircle will invest in setting up a fake company to show how to use the app daily and everything that comes with that in a screencast series. This application isn't for everybody and some of you will have enough with what Apple or Google is already offering but if you want more I still would recommend that you try it out. I think I'm not too far off when I say that it is really situated toward small businesses like me. There is a 30 day demo that you can download. I just feel it is missing a bit of the Apple ease of use. You know what I mean, we don't look at the manual don't we, we want to jump right in and forget all about it :) Pricing starts at $189 for a single user with the integration plug-in for Apple Mail.