The CRMbrella Blog

Traffic is growing, downloads of the product are ticking upward. Thanks to everyone for helping–we really appreciate it.

We use CircleDog too–by the way! Stay tuned for some product news…

The CRMbrella blog has been fun, but it’s time to move it on over…the big ol dog is movin in. Click here to get to the CircleDog Blog.

We’re working on additional widgets for the Dashboard. (At some point, anyone will be able to build them). What would you like to see?

My mom taught herself how to use computers. She bought the Dummies and Idiots books, took a class or two, and wrote lots of step-by-step instructions on how to use software like Microsoft Word. I’d try to show her something, and she’d write down the steps. When she’d try it, her eyes would get that glassy look you get when you don’t quite know what you’re expected to do next. Frustrating.

Software like Microsoft Word can be very useful, but the way tasks are organized is difficult for a lot of people. Products like Word and Act contact management software are stuffed with menus stuffed with features, and as a result the classes for them are stuffed with people seeking understanding and the bookshelves in the computer self-help section are stuffed with Dummies books. But customers aren’t dummies.

We’ve been led down a path by Microsoft and other software companies from the 80’s and 90’s that established the convention of burying functionality in a series of drop-down menus. And instead of offering just what people need, these companies would build customer functionality for a few customers, then include that for every customer, regardless of the relevance of the features. It’s not wonder that numerous studies show that most computer users use less than 10% of the functionality offered in Word, Excel, and Act.

And then everything is available all the time through crowded and redundant menu-based toolbars, packed with so many icons you need a separate guide to learn what the icons mean.

So most software follows this convention. CRMbrella doesn’t. We chose to design around what’s relevant, rather than what’s possible. If software offers everything all at once on every screen, it’s very hard to understand just what is expected of you. So we make things much more focused, contextual, and relevant to your intended actions. Instructions are usually clear (let us know when they aren’t), and help is always available for the current screen–it’s context-sensitive so you don’t have to go searching for it.

We’re close to the goal of giving our customers deep, relevant functionality in the easiest way possible. You’ll notice we’re very careful about navigation and presenting relevant tasks only when, well, relevant. We’re still including two top-level dropdown menus–File and Help–in which a number of functions are, well, buried. And we’re considering how best to remove them. It’s not easy designing software this way, but we’ve found that most customers understand it right away: Sections are on the top, relevant tasks are on the left, help is on the right and follows you where you go.

If you find yourself stuck, if something in the software isn’t obvious and easy for you–please tell us. Your honest, open, and frequent feedback is so important to building better software. By the way–Mom uses GiftWorks fundraising software, available over on the Mission Research site.

The Hybrid Web. When Dave and I started down this path we talked about leveraging the supercomputers on our desktops, which perform much better than the browser running on those computers. We new that the rich desktop would outperform web applications for a long time. But we also knew this Internet thing was gonna be big (people still laugh at that joke, which as usual, wasn’t mine). Chili!Soft was at the beginning of that, sitting between operating system giants, and ultimately consumed by one of them, Sun Microsystems (JAVA).  

It’s still true. We built GiftWork and CRMbrella on a platform to leverage that power of the desktop but integrated with the web. The ridiculous statement “No software” pushed by the self-interested hosted applications providers does nothing to change that. Hosted applications (Software as a Service) were developed as a response to the shaky state of the desktop, it’s lack of reliability and slow performance a true drag on productivity.

But that was 1999. In 2008, the dominant operating system is stable (Windows XP), the PC is at least 100 times more powerful, RAM is cheap, storage is cheap, and just about everyone has a decent PC, if you would only uninstall the bloatware and freeware that clogs up our systems (and maintain it, yes, you still have to defrag once in a while).

But web applications are terrific. Not for minute by minute, hour by hour work like customer management, but for task-specific things, like some mapping (not all), email marketing, hosted remote backup, social apps, ecommerce, etc. None of these are apps you would spend all day working in, but they are all better suited for the web, not the desktop.

Except most of us work on both. So we developed the Hybrid Web, which merges the two. So far, we haven’t done a lot of obvious stuff on the web side of things. There’s some AJAX for grabbing info from our servers, the usage files are posted to the server for analysis and support, and you can map contacts out to Microsoft maps. And in the labs we’ve integrated wth Facebook ad Google Maps in some interesting ways.

But the core of what we’ll be delivering over the next year will come from two efforts: our SDK, which will allow developers to build their own add-ins to CRMbrella that integrate with the web (or desktop), and our online services infrastructure, which we are building out now.

What we’ve learned from customers is that we’re close but not quite where we need to be. First, one of the benefits of hosted applications (and shortcomings) is that they are browser-based and reachable from anywhere on the web. You don’t always have web access, so that’s a limitation.

But with CRMbrella, we don’t offer inherent web-based accessibilty. You can get there through Remote Desktop Connection and other methods, but that’s not seamless, and we are al about seamlessness and simplicity. So you’ll see us working hard on that issue, something we’ve solved in another project, but given the size of our customer base it needs a robust effort.

And then a lot is up to you. We can integrate with just about anything that has a decent web API. The question is, what makes sense to you? Integration with eBay? Amazon? InfoUsa? Yahoo? Let us know. Part of my job is to see the holes and build the solutions to them on your behalf. Call it pragmatic application of near-field discovery: a fancy way of saying there’s a simple solution by tying existing technologies together in a useful way.

Now that CRMbrella is ready for the market, the team is focused on the Pro version. I’m working on building the team, and sketching out near-field solutions. It’s an exciting time at Mission Research.

Charles Wilson is a friend from the West Coast. Nice to hear this shout out…

“If you’re a small business an you’re looking for a way to manage your prospects and customers, look no further.”

Clearly a man of good taste…

We’ve had a few emails back from early users of CRMbrella, most of whom converted from SalesWorks. One of them did have an issue, but their IT consultant took care of it, so it looks like we’re going well so far.

One thing Schelle noticed in support was a bug in the Smartlist display of the Contact Description field. It’s fine in view contact, but we’ll fix it for the SmartList in the July update.

Keep the feedback coming!