Nearly all the contacts in the medical industry (where I’m working now), below to several organisations – eg one person is a director of one company, holds an academic position at a university, and also runs a private venture as well.

Highrise does not support having one contact belong to multiple companies, which is an absolute necessity for us.

I agree and built it:

http://honeypitch.com/

I still think it is an oversight, considering Outlook gives you at least 4 different text file formats to export to.

Point taken on permissions, but you are still talking about per-instance, rather than based on groups or types, but groups/types I found out later don’t exist so you can’t put permissions on something that isn’t there

As for markets, I don’t think this market is sexy at all – it is actually dead boring, which might explain why CRM penetration in sub-50 person companies is less than 10%. There can be many reasons for that, one might be that it is lack of solution, some might think its lack of demand or understanding. I guess the simple open question there is – how do you get somebody who is using Outlook or even Outlook Express to use Highrise. My comment about “not using any sort of application” was supposed to be tounge-in-cheeck, but I didn’t re-read so it probably doesn’t come out that way – what it meant was ‘who really is there that doesn’t already use contact management as part of their email application’.

I am sure that the answer there is todo lists (which you have a solution for), cases, for which the user compensates in lag (eg. looking up contacts in highrise, clicking on their email address. Having to CC highrise etc.), cost and complexity of an additional app. The question that keeps coming up is, if I have an email app with ok contact management – does Highrise complement or supplant that?

As for the number of contacts, thats fine, but if this app is for business users or groups then the people who can afford to pay for it are likely to have more contacts than a handful.

As an aside, my list of contacts are from the past 15 months – people I have emailed with (reply and response) as well as leads and customers. It isn’t my personal contact book either – its business related.

My perspective is that of a job seeker. I wanted CRM-like funcitonality but with specific features for me. I also didn’t want to have to translate sales lingo into personal professional career management lingo.

So, I developed my own thing (JibberJobber) – which has been live since May. No matter what CRM tool you have at your office (unless of course you are a one-man show) I strongly encourage you to have your own personal system. You are making contacts every day. You are meeting people that might have an impact on your career future. And when you get pink-slipped, fed-up or whatever, those contacts will be crucial.

Go check out Highrise for business CRM (or Salesforce, or Goldmine, or any of the hundreds of other solutions), but make sure you have your own personal system (even post-it notes for all I care) — I was laid off and I wished that I had my own network just the way I had a CRM tool at work (it was Goldmine). Cuz when you get laid off (or whatever) they won’t let you access their database.

Jason Alba
CEO – JibberJobber.com

I agree with most people though. Highrise is overpriced for what you get.

I have used Salesforce, SugarCRM and ZohoCRM and I think they are super clumsy and WAY to complicated for most uses.

I personally think Pipeline Deals is the one to use. https://pipelin...content/pricing

They have a simple interface with almost no bloat and a decent price. There is no limit on contacts or “deals” (what 37signals calls “cases”) but they charge per user. They have no email integration though from what I’ve seen.

I signed up for a trial a while ago and used it and liked it but didn’t sign up for a paid account because I was waiting for 37signals solution. Well I’ve seen it (Highrise) and I’m not to impressed from a bang-for-the-buck standpoint.

Why would you pay (this much) for Highrise?

It is the reverse of Salesforce. In SF, you can send emails from SF but not receive them. I think that receiving email is possible at higher license levels or with their spring ‘07 release.

In Highrise, it seems like the integration with the rest of your life is via a Highrise dropbox. I tried to forward some meetings I have set up in my outlook calendar to my dropbox to see if they would register in Highrise.

Highrise rejected them all for a variety of different reasons. Am I missing something? There doesn’t seem to be much of real value here if I can’t sync Highrise to my calendar even if I am willing to do it manually by copying all my meetings into outlook and my dropbox.

– Then 250 which sounds ok … ummm … wouldn’t handle my current 3,000.

– How is this better; than buying the same or building the same, for 1,000.00 then owning it forever?

– How hard can it be?, just build a PHP/Mysql/250 gig Godaddy hosting; then use it for only your company; total cost $1,000 (build cost) $70 a year.

My only complain is that the cases tool should be included to all paid accounts, and not just the premium ones.. I’d like to use it with just a few contacts

Meet you in the summer with our offering in this space (with a twist, of course). We are closing corporate customers now and will release the product to the internet public by July on our website at http://www.telepark.com

And as always: you will actually be able to buy and own it, too.

Patrick

http://www.bads...o-be-a-success/

Another product that should be mentioned alongside of them is Big Contacts – http://www.bigcontacts.com We quietly launched an open beta in January and are releasing the product on April 1st. It is a 100% Ajax application designed for groups. You can import any number (thousands) of contacts. Assign tasks. Schedule meetings. Write notes. Attach files, etc. There is a sales opporutnity tracking system and you can build a custom pipeline with products and track sales. You can create as many contact types as you wish.

Big Contacts is completely FREE for up to 500 contacts.

Highrise is just too expensive for what it does.