What if your CRM was on with your Outlook?

Got your contacts spread all over the place? What if your CRM was built into Outlook? Outlook CRM? One less thing to sync, no?

Avidian is the maker of Prophet Opportunity Manager. Check out the demo.  Most of us are stuck using Outlook so it would be nice to have those quick clicks into CRM world.  But on the other, there are so many annoyances with Outlook to begin with...seems like a negative multiplier.  

Then again, when I think of how salesforce.com manages emails.....it leaves me longing for Outlook's .pst file when I hop from company to company.  So maybe Outlook CRM is work a closer look especially if you're a smaller business. 

For the curious, here's another stab at Outlook-based CRM. 

Here's why I started this blog

The impetus to start this blog stemmed from my desire to sync plaxo, jigsaw, salesforce.com, linkedin, outlook and blackberry. I always find myself deleting duplicate contacts, etc. and none of the contacts I have in each of these is ever really synced up well. I sent a note into my IT dept to see if they had any insights and someone suggested making Outlook the hub of the process. As I'll discuss later, that makes sense. But when I look at each of these contact databases, something like the diagram below comes to mind.

That's partially the point of this Contact and Calender Syncronization writeup created a year ago. As you can see from the image below, it goes to the complexity that every day people are facing as new gadgets come along and we try to keep a unified view of our work and personal life.