Man, if there was ever unusable software that showed more promise–and thus–was more frustrating, I can’t imagine it. 37 Signals Highrise CRM is ultimately useable as a place to store contacts and contact information. It’s got some rudimentary TODO features…but it lacks so much that makes it frustrating.
What it does right–is a DEAD simple interface. It’s got an intuitive and easy-to-learn|use|do vibe. It has a zero-learning curve bias, and it’s seriously cool. I want them to upgrade it so I can start using it. It’s got taggable contacts, a good amount of info you can put in, notes, privacy settings (dead simple), and other features.
It’s got a concept called cases where you can add contacts to a case based on what’s going on; and assign tasks and share info with a case. I can imagine that that would be helpful to keep realtors abreast of what’s going on with deals, but man-oh-man does it suck.
It is easier than Facebook–no–it’s what Facebook should be.
What Highrise Doesn’t Do Well:
Iterative work: processing loans requires certain steps that happen on every deal (i.e. order title, appraisal, VOE/VOM/VOD etc). There’s no "activity series" that you can schedule for one or many contacts. Marketing campaigns are the same way; there’s no functionality for this process–you can use tags as a crude kludge, but it’s not ready for any kind of workflow or rules or customization.
This is based on the "free" version; if the "paid version adds any of these features (and it doesn’t appear to), correct me so I can become a raving fan.
The bottom line is that this has the coolest interface and most promise of almost anything that I’ve seen, but it’s a few features away from being useful. The balance they have to strike is depth vs. speed. Compared to Zoho and Free CRM, it was WAY faster.
Right now I’m leaning towards using Zoho’s docs.
OH…By the way.
The Net was abuzz this week with the addition of forms to the spreadsheets, but I’m really more excited about the fact that you can now lock COLUMNS as well as rows; this makes it much more useful to work with Google Docs. Now I’m off to find some stuff that I’ve missed.
And in case you missed it:
LH on adding work life balance to your GTD weekly review
Copyblogger on the Rule of 3
The Positivity Blog gives us Confucius
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