Almost on a daily basis, I come across opportunities to refer business to someone. Sometimes I’m asked for a resource, like if I know someone who can design business cards. Sometimes a possible connection just pops in my head, like if a person I come in contact with mentions something that reminds me of someone else or of an opportunity that might interest him or her. Other times, though, I miss the opportunity to make a referral simply because no one comes to mind right away. Yet, if I gave it some thought or asked some of my existing contacts, I’m sure I could easily find a resource to fill the need.

As a business owner, maximizing these opportunities is really important for several reasons:

1. It solidifies your place in the customer’s mind as a go-to resource, as someone who can always help solve problems and find solutions,
2. It reinforces relationships you’re building by showing your willingness to help those around you, and
3. It opens the door for reciprocal referrals between you and other service providers to which you regularly send business.

But how do you make sure you’re ready to act the minute an opportunity presents itself (or at least not very long afterward)?

Step 1: Have Tools in Place to Support You

There are tons of CRM and contact management applications available to help you manage an ever-growing database of connections. Highrise is my favorite; I like the simplicity and ease-of-use of 37Signals tools.

Of course, even the best tool won’t help you if you don’t populate it with data, and this can be the most intimidating part of starting to use contact management software. My recommendation is to ease into it. Start from today and add new contacts you come in contact with. To get existing contacts into the program, try adding a few each day until you have everyone set up. There are ways to import contacts from other programs, too. Just be sure to go through all applications and places where you currently keep information about contacts, including your email and social networking accounts, past blog entries (for example, if you interviewed someone for your site or they provided a guest post), and anywhere else you might find a long-lost resource.

The most important thing, though, is to be sure and tag each person in every way you might search for him or her. For example, you might tag a virtual assistant as VA, virtual assistant, web designer, website designer, etc., depending on that particular virtual assistant’s expertise and skill set.

Step 2: Get to Know the People in Your Network

Learn what your network does. Learn what they need. Recently, someone asked if I knew of anyone who did a particular type of web design. At the time, no one came to mind, but then just a week later, I met another person who fitted the bill. I did an email introduction, which will hopefully lead to shared referrals between the two of them.

Pay attention to the little details about people, even things like hobbies and past work experience. If someone is an avid reader, for instance, you might need a book recommendation one day, or maybe you’ll read a great book that you can pass along to that person. As you discover these little tidbits, enter them (again, as tags) in the person’s contact record.

Not only does paying attention to the “little things” help you along the way as a business owner, but it also deepens your relationships and builds your credibility.

Step 3: Keep Your Network Top of Mind.

Always be thinking of the people around you. How can you help them? How can you help not just your clients and followers, but also fellow business owners? Every connection, every referral and every introduction strengthens your network and your business. People will come to trust and depend on you for quality recommendations and resources to help them in their lives and businesses.

Step 4: Show Initiative

Show people you can help them. When someone asks for a web designer and that’s out of your area of expertise, go to your contact management software and search for “web designer” and see who shows up. Nothing will impress a customer more than you going the extra mile for him or her and sending over a list of quality web designers.

By developing a strong and comprehensive list of resources, it becomes even easier to take better care of your customers and clients, as well as all the relationships in your network, and of course, there’s something to be said for good karma and paying it forward.

What tips do you have for maintaining a better “little black book”?

Photo by Flickr user vince42, licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Social Media in the Enterprise

Zoho CRM, Zoho Mail and Zoho Docs all get new abilities to interact with and use documents from Google Docs, which should be welcome news for anyone wanting to try out the Zoho alternative without either starting from scratch or going through an arduous migration process with their existing library of docs.

Zoho CRM

Attach files directly from your associated Google Docs account to Leads, Accounts, and Cases within Zoho CRM. All you have to do is authenticate using your Google credentials when prompted, and voila, your Docs should appear for you to choose from, in addition to your Zoho Docs and files on your desktop.

Zoho Mail

Adding an attachment when you’re composing an email is as easy as clicking on the little arrow next to the “Attach” link, and selecting Google Docs from the list of sources. If you haven’t done so already, Zoho will send you to Google to authenticate, and then your files will appear in a list with checkboxes next to them so you can select multiple attachments at a time. Zoho also allows you to filter your Docs, so that you can view only text, spreadsheet, or presentation files.

Zoho Docs and Projects

The same interface is used to get documents directly from your Google Docs account to both Zoho Docs and Projects, although you might want to note that with Zoho Docs, uploading directly from Google is supported only in the dashboard view. Trying to do so from the dedicated Docs window only allows you to import from Google Docs files you’ve downloaded to your desktop.

I’ve always been a Google user myself, but upon revisiting Zoho’s offerings for the purposes of this piece, I find myself wondering why. I’m not a Gmail or Google Calendar guy, and short of forthcoming integration with Google Wave, which I’m not crazy about anyway, there’s really no reason I should stick with Google when the competition is clearly much more obliging. For now, I’m going to test the Zoho waters and see how things turn out.

Does Google Docs integration give you a reason to give Zoho a try?

I haven’t used Bento since it was first released, so a lot is new to me. For the purposes of this review, I won’t be detailing what’s changed so much as what strikes me as most useful about the program from a web working angle, since I imagine many of you will be new to the software as well.

The Basics

By default, Bento looks somewhat unassuming. It lists databases that already exist on your computer, whether you were thinking of them as such or not. That includes your Address Book contacts, your iCal events and tasks and your iPhoto library. It also lists a category called “Projects,” which starts out with dummy content for demo purposes. So, out of the box (pardon the pun), Bento is a convenient, all-in-one storage spot for all of your existing work and play-related Mac data that looks great to boot. But it can be more than that, too.

You’ll notice that in addition to the nicely-designed interface, the entry screens associated with items in your databases provide more customizability than their counterparts in the apps themselves. Address book entries, for example, can be browsed in an Excel-like list view, or in a grid-style view that’s reminiscent of one of the ways of browsing your albums in iTunes. Each entry has all the data that your Address Book card includes, but you can customize them further, adding photos, objects, text fields, or many other things.

Bento for CRM

That comes in handy when you want to use Bento as a CRM application. You can include details like known family members, business partners, and associates, all through your own custom fields. Add a preferred meeting place, best time of day to contact, corporate gifting schedule, or whatever else you may need to keep track off. Attach meeting notes or agenda files to keep a record of your interaction with said customer. It truly can be as powerful as you need it to be.

Bento for PM

As project management software, Bento is equally versatile. You can attach the same sort of custom fields to your projects here, and tie them to your address book and other collections for easy, single location access. If you need to open iCal or another app to check or change something directly, Bento can do that for you, too.

Keeping track of complex, multi-staged projects can be difficult, but Bento has a Smart Collections feature which should allow you to navigate even the most treacherous of prolonged endeavors. Set filters to catch all entries under a specific budget, for example, or by end or start date, or by the PM assigned to the task in question. It’s a great way to make sure nothing falls through the cracks without having to manually comb through every entry.

Bento for Everything

There’s countless uses of Bento for those working from home, so I won’t go into much more detail here, but it does feature handy, pre-made templates for time-tracking, inventory management, expense monitoring and issue tracking. It might take a little more setting up than tools designed specifically for those purposes, since it is made to be a jack-of-all-trades, rather than a master of one, but that also means it could become an end-t0-end solution for all of your business needs if you put in the time and effort to make it so.

Bento 3 is available as a free trial from Filemaker. The full version will run you $49.99 U.S. for a single user license, or $99.99 for a five-user family copy. Those who already own previous versions of Bento (either 1 or 2) are eligible for a $20 rebate. The way I see it, $50 is not a very high asking price for something that could easily do the job of three or four other programs, but try it out first to see if it fits your working style.

What programs do you currently use to manage your work-related databases on Mac or PC? Do you think pleasing aesthetics affect your database-related work one way or another?

But are there any problems that can arise from conducting business conversations through social media?

There are practical concerns that go along with communicating through a variety of different tools. If you need to refer back to those discussions, whether you’re pulling out a quote that you got on a project or you need to double-check on a deadline, having multiple places to look for that information can make things a little harder. Some telecommuters follow company policies on how to communicate with the rest of the company, but many of us have messages spread out over half a dozen different sites.

It can be useful to communicate with your clients and co-workers through social media tools: after all, if you want to point them to a particular link or introduce them to another member of your network, most sites have built-in tools to do exactly that. The timing and format can also play a key role — after all, the ability to IM with a co-worker can make it much easier to complete your work while still staying out of the office. But with these tools, there aren’t always the reliable records that a freelancer, an employee or another web worker may need to easily access. Just because a client tells you to go ahead on a project over Twitter doesn’t mean that you don’t need a little more documentation to make sure that everyone is on the same page.

There are ways to consolidate your social media communications: most sites send you a notification via email whenever you receive a new message through the network. Some include the text of the message, making it at least a little easier to search for information. Those options typically do not forward the messages you send to your email account, however, so you’ll still be left searching across multiple sites for any messages you sent.

Another alternative is to use some sort of customer relationship management solution to bring all of your messages from different clients and co-workers together in one place. A tool like Gist could be helpful. In order to be efficient in your communications, it’s worth bringing all your messages together in one place if you can, especially if that place allows you to search easily.

It may also be worth making a personal policy about what tools you’ll use: if you send most of your messages via email, your clients and co-workers are more likely to send their responses through the same system. While it’s tempting to use newer, more fashionable communication tools, it’s also worth making sure that you can easily access and search your own communications.

Do you communicate with clients and co-workers through social media? How do you make sure that you can find messages when you need them?

As Jennifer reports over on GigaOM, after approximately a year of limited closed beta they’ve decided to open up the gates and make the Gist beta public. The folks at Gist had taken a bit of a different take for their beta. A carefully vetted group of participants were given access over an extended period of time, along with direct access to support and incredibly responsive feedback channels. As a result, Gist has improved substantially since our last look and is a highly recommended tool to add to your business arsenal.

In a nutshell, Gist leverages your inbox to determine the importance of people in your network, and then scours the web to gather information about those people. Pulling data from news sites, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and more, Gist automatically creates a personal dossier using this information.

With the proliferation of news sources and the volume of data now available, it’s impossible to keep up and attempt to do this type of research manually. In a survey prepared by Gist, it was determined that 60 percent of respondents spend less than 10 minutes before an important meeting searching for information abut the participants.

By making research easy and doing the heavy lifting for you, those who have limited time can gain more useful information in the time they do have, while those who like to do extensive research can cut that time considerably.

I’ve always liked the fact that Gist doesn’t require you to abandon the communication tools that you are already using. The full web interface pulls data in from external sources and while that offers the most comprehensive views of your data, useful integration with Outlook and Salesforce (announced today) make Gist data available while you are working in your familiar tools.

The integration of Gist with CRM tools is a terribly exciting development. In the Gist survey, only 15 percent of folks said that they looked to their CRM before a meeting for information on participants. Clearly, the bulk of existing tools are lacking in providing useful, timely and relevant information. The shift to Social CRM shift acknowledges the importance of what is happening on the social web. The movement of CRM to be more social, and to recognize that conversations are happening outside of traditional channels is a trend that we’ve been talking about for a while, and one I’m happy to see catching on.

Tools like Salesforce and Batchbook already recognize the value of the social web and are on the leading edge of allowing varying degrees of social media integration right from within their interfaces. Gist’s Salesforce integration is slick and I look forward to more services offering Gist hooks, as the tool is really the most comprehensive that I’ve seen. Even just a quick glance at recent Twitter updates can be a great conversation starter, and with Gist I can see that information while I’m looking up a phone number.

With a nice thoughtful feature set, useful interface and a developing network of integration with other tools, I find Gist to be a radically useful tool. It occasionally overloads me with data but given the alternative, that’s a problem I’m willing to deal with.

Sign up for your spot in the Gist public beta starting today.

How do you keep up to date with your business contacts?

Customer relationship management (CRM) software is a crucial component of Bantam Live’s dashboard, and for good reason. Whether you’re building a web site or selling a product, you never do it in a vacuum. Instead, there are a wide variety of people that must be contacted at various points. Bantam Live does far more than just keep a central file of phone numbers and email addresses, though: for every given contact, you can track their social media presence on sites like Twitter and LinkedIn. At a glance, you can see what your contacts have been up to and communicate more effectively with them.

Bantam Live takes other cues from social media, too. The first opportunity to interact that you see is a field for status updates. Those updates show up in a real-time activity stream, along with newly created and completed tasks, notes, events and updates to contacts. You can easily interact with each item that appears in the stream, accepting event invitations, commenting on status updates, and so forth.

The learning curve for using Bantam Live is very shallow, making it a practical system to use for short-lived teams. Bringing together a team to put up a major web site but not really planning on working together after it’s complete? Bantam Live can provide a simple way to bring together your team for a few months. You can import an address book’s worth of contacts, add in your tasks and get to work quickly. Even bringing in new team members should take only a matter of minutes, including training them to use Bantam Live: the interface is simple to use and fairly intuitive.

Bantam Live is currently in beta — although its slick interface can lead you to believe otherwise. During the beta period, even large teams can use it for free, and Bantam Live’s creators encourage you to use it with a team: the system is set up to focus on interactions, leading it to be less useful for solo users. However, there are plans to roll out a version for single users, complete with appropriate features, this fall.

Considering how important this sort of information is to everyone working on your project (as well as how interesting your competitors might find it), the fact that Bantam Live uses SSL security on its application at each level is reassuring.

If you’ve tried Bantam Live, tell us what you think of the service in the comments.

Even across great distances, we can still schmooze and butter up with the best of ‘em. The key is good CRM, which applies regardless of distance. Here are some examples of how you might go about bridging that geographic gap to form a solid client-contractor bond.

A Little Friendship Goes a Long Way

It’s hard to gauge the degree of formality a client expects from you, especially if you only correspond via email or other digital means. If possible, however, and if you aren’t getting any red flags, you should try to let yourself be a little more human in correspondence with at least one of your client’s staff. This might mean exchanging emails beyond the professional minimum, or connecting on Twitter or Facebook, or whatever you think might result in a more chummy relationship.

It’s a far cry from a wild night out on the town, but it will still go a long way toward making your professional connections more than just an email address you send correspondence and work product to. Make sure you’re not overstepping any boundaries here, though, or you’ll end up doing more damage than good.

Dinner’s On Me, Even If I’m Not There

Just because you aren’t physically able to take clients to dinner doesn’t mean you can’t do that remotely, too. Try to find out your client’s taste when it comes to food and restaurant choices, and then, if possible, get gift certificates to send them on special occasions. While gift certificates may not always be available, especially for independent restaurants, contact the restaurant directly, and I’m sure most of the time you’ll be able to work something out.

The key to success with this kind of gifting is making sure it’s timed appropriately. Just giving a client dinner for no apparent reason could actually backfire and arouse suspicion that something isn’t going well with the project. If you’re familiar enough with your client to know personal details like anniversaries and birthdays, than that’s the time to choose to do something like this, but if not, stick to major project successes.

Quirky Gifts

I’ve actually only been on the receiving end of this, but it worked a treat. In passing, I mentioned on Twitter my dismay that Apple Jacks (the cereal) wasn’t available for purchase in Canada. Within the week, I’d received two boxes of the coveted breakfast item in the mail. A colleague had spotted the mention and quickly rushed to my aid, at his own expense, expecting nothing in return.

This small act of kindness did more to solidify my good feelings toward him than probably a year’s worth of email or Twitter correspondence could have. This kind of opportunity may not just fall in your lap like my Apple Jacks comment, but if you keep your eyes and ears open when dealing with your client, a similar situation might arise in which you’re in a unique position to scratch a quirky itch in a fun way. Best of all, in most cases this kind of relationship-building won’t cost you nearly as much as dinner or other gifts, and it comes with a significantly higher rater of return compared to other methods, in my opinion.

It may not be quite the same as traditional face-to-face business outings, but there’s a lot of relationship-building you can do as a remote worker, too. It helps keep clients happy, yes, but it also helps you put a human face on your contacts and professional associates, which is far more valuable in the long run.

Photo courtesy Rifu Senka on Flickr

The price is unbeatable for lone freelancers and business owners, with a $0 price tag. If you work with a team that will need access to the software, it’ll cost 30 euros ($40) per user per month, with the first user free. Should the out-of-the-box package not have everything you need, Severa has add-ons available for a fee.

Severa succeeds in standing out from the field with one-click access to common features. The Dashboard (in the screenshot below) has a clean layout with good color contrast to help with quick scanning.

All of the fields, pages and drop-down menus are customizable so you can remove those you don’t need or add more options. Severa does a nice job of ensuring its forms display key information and limit the number of required fields.

You can search your data with keywords and limit searches to just one part of the application. Advanced search has a long list of columns to use as filters for searching. The right-hand side of the app holds a calendar and quick help box that changes based on where you point your mouse.

Viewing an account displays all of its contacts, cases and invoices. Like the rest of the app’s pages, the “Case” page avoids presenting too many fields. Cases come with a useful “Internal” tab for non-billable or internal work so you can track non-revenue producing activities. However, adding tasks to a case feels crude, as you can see in the next screenshot. It’s easy to make a mistake by not getting the format right. Those tasks are important when it comes to doing time sheets. The tasks will show up as an item so you can enter the time worked. This ties in with the invoice, which will reflect the time worked and the rate.

As an example, I created a new account called “WebWorkerDaily” (client) with Mr. Simon Mackie as the primary contact. I used this assignment in creating a new case from within the WebWorkerDaily account and referred to it as “Severa Project.” Adding the tasks came next, followed by entering my time for the assignment. So far, so good.

However, I hit a roadblock with the “Invoicing” and “Fees” sections. It took some experimenting before Severa finally spit out the invoice with the right information as it appears in the next screenshot. Once over the hump, I breezed through the application.

Severa has a sleek interface that lets you dive right in. It has a couple of minor obstacles, but so do most applications in this space. The CRM will suit those looking for a well-integrated and even-keeled solution, without feature overkill — it also sports LinkedIn, Facebook and Google Maps integration. Having CRM, project management and invoicing all in one app will make a lot of sense to many web workers.

The Finnish company’s software supports English (both U.S. and UK varieties) and Finnish.

What do you think of Severa’s CRM, project management, time tracking and invoicing solution?

It’s hard to say he’s going about things the wrong way, because he’s never been fired, but I strongly believe that some kind of CRM software would help him a lot in his work, and single him out as a progressively-minded individual with his employers. There are so many easy-to-use, free options out there, you’d have trouble not finding a good solution. Recently, I tried out Funnela, and I think it has something to offer people like my friend.

Like Relenta, another CRM app I recently covered, Funnela makes simplicity its main selling point. It offers the basics, and little else, which is great for a beginner. There are some minor language issues, since Funnela comes from a Polish developer, but these minor quirks don’t interfere with the app’s usability.

Once you’ve signed up, logging in takes you to your dashboard, where you have an overview of your upcoming tasks and appointments. You also get a feed of changes, new tasks and updates as they occur. This is particularly useful if you attach multiple users to your account, which you may choose to do if you’re running a small business or working with a partner. In the case of someone like my friend, you could set coworkers up with accounts.

You can either jump directly to tasks from your dashboard, or use the tabbed navigation system to access different features. “Mail” works like most web-based services, and even provides smart folders, both pre-set and the option to create ones yourself. You can set up reply-to addresses, but by default, your address will be “yourcompanyname”@funnela.net. On free accounts, you can only work with mail sent to that address, but you can always just set up automatic forwarding from your actual work account.

“Contacts” has a nice three-tiered layout, with groups, lists, and detailed profile panes. You can create contacts from within the app, add them from emails, or import them from .csv files or Highrise. Strangely, there’s no “import” button in the main contacts screen; I finally tracked it down in the “Settings” page, which I found to be a little counterintuitive. I also would appreciate an option to import individual contacts from vCard files, since that doesn’t appear to be an option at this time.

Funnela’s “Calendar” and “Task” screens are also very straightforward and simple. The calendar application in particular looks to be based heavily an Apple’s iCal, which is not a bad thing. You can add as many calendars as you need, and share them with other members on your account, too. Tasks have convenient built-in filters in case your schedule gets complicated, and a nice notes interface for adding additional information.

The real appeal of Funnela, especially for CRM beginners, is the simplicity it offers, because it can be hard adjusting to life beyond the padfolio. Basic options and a straightforward interface that has everything you need, if not all the bells and whistles, are just what the doctor ordered for those unfamiliar with CRM software. With simplicity comes a lack of customizability, though, so more experienced users may find it somewhat vexing. Still, having yet another option when it comes to web apps that might help enliven your sales can never hurt. The free plan is limited to one user and a default funnela.com email address. Paid accounts vary from $15 to $149 per month, depending on how many users you want on the account and how much storage you need. All the paid accounts let you work with your own email addresses. A 30-day free trial is available on all plans.

What CRM software do you use?

Zoho CRM comes with all the basic CRM functions you’d expect: You can manage campaigns and leads, view reports and dashboards and manage inventory.

Getting Started

It’s best to start at CRM.zoho.com, even if you have an existing Zoho account. At first glance, the application looks overwhelming, especially if it’s the first CRM package you’ve used. Zoho has a useful Getting Started video that gives you a quick overview of the application and makes it feel less threatening.

Everything you need to access appears in the tabs at the top of the screen and the links below them. You can customize most of the reports and dashboards as well as the settings for every tab.

The first thing you’ll want to do is add a second user as an administrator so you can access more features, including adding your company’s logo.

Setup

To start with, you need to import your business contacts. This will give you some content in your CRM to work with the rest of its features. You can import contacts from whatever application you use for business contacts, in comma-separated value (.csv), Excel (.xls) or vCard (.vcf) format. A tip: Before importing the data, open the file in Excel and make sure the first row contains headings, as you’ll need to match up Zoho’s fields with your data.

If, like many web workers, you have a service-based business, it will take a little work to figure out how to set up Zoho CRM. It focuses on products and doesn’t work with hourly rates. For example, if you’re a writer creating a quote for some web content, you’ll need to treat the web content as a package and give it a flat project rate. If you charge by the hour, you can always make a note of it in the description field.

Fields, Forms and Features

Zoho CRM has a useful wiki-based Help section. Helpfully, it includes user questions and answers at the end of each page.

You’ll need to refer to that Help section every now and again, because some of Zoho CRM’s field names take some figuring out. For example, the “Create Potential” form requires filling out the “Potential Name” and “Account Name” fields. Do they both take the company name? Or a contact person’s name? It takes a little digging into the Help section and even there, it’s not clear.

Fortunately, the required fields are few. Zoho has plenty of non-required fields so you can keep track of as many details as you need. Its settings let you remove unneeded fields, but it won’t let you change field names such as “Unit Price.”

Tracking and Managing Leads

The key reason businesses invest in CRM is for tracking and managing sales leads. The Leads tab lists all the active leads for easy reviewing and updating. After creating a new lead, you can return to that lead to update its page with information including attachments, products and activity tracking. You send emails straight from the application, with a record of the sent email added automatically to the lead’s page.

If you need to track many leads, Zoho CRM keeps all the information in one place for easier management. Once a lead converts to a sale, Zoho CRM removes it from the Leads tab and moves it though the pipeline, automatically creating the account details.

Customer Support

Customer support is handled with the Cases feature, which provides tools to manage customer trouble tickets. Another useful feature is Solutions. Here you can keep track of common questions and answers. Then when a customer or a prospect has questions, and you can search Solutions to see if you or another person in your team has solved it before.

As well as being able to search within specific categories, like Solutions, an account-wide search box is always available. The search results are sorted by category.

Activities and Calendar

You can keep track of key dates using the Calendar. You can also enter tasks and activities along with due dates in Activities. However, they don’t show up on the Calendar, and they should.

Price

Zoho CRM is available in three different flavors. While most web workers should be able to get by with the free version, the Professional edition costs $12 per user per month, while the Enterprise edition costs $25 per user per month. Note that Zoho charges for some features on the free account, such as the Outlook plug-in, requests for importing all data and adding storage space.

You can see some screen shots of the application in use and see also check out the online demos. Compared to other CRM solutions, Zoho’s CRM package is affordable and easier to learn. Web workers will more than likely find most of what they need in Zoho CRM for a great price.

How do you track leads and manage client accounts?

What CreativePro Office offers is one-stop shopping for project management, time tracking, invoicing and job quotes. That’s a lot to fit under one roof, and the solution is web-based, so you don’t have to clutter up your hard drive.

An account at CreativePro Office is free, which is priced perfectly for me, and probably for most independent contractors and small groups of creative professionals. For $150, you can also opt to install the CreativePro software on your own server. That’s definitely well-priced compared to other similar solutions, since it’s a one-time fee, not a subscription or a renewable license.

Once you sign up for your free account, you’ll have access to your own personalized CreativePro Office dashboard. By default, your dashboard looks like the screenshot above, displaying your Projects, Invoices, Calendar, a search bar for your account, and Notes. You can customize your dashboard screen by minimizing, adding, or removing individual boxes on this page, in the same way that you would with iGoogle. You can also add Delicious bookmarks and RSS feeds to your dashboard, with support for more widgets to come in future updates. The calendar is completely resident on the dashboard, so you can add and delete events without switching tabs.

The menu along the top of the dashboard give you access to the Clients, Projects, Timesheets, Finances and My Team sections. The menus sport drop-down interfaces so you can quickly access commonly used features without changing pages.

Adding a contact presents a lot of options, although only a couple are required if you’re in a hurry or don’t need someone’s full biography. Still, all the options, including notes and tags, make CreativePro Office’s contact manager a fairly good CRM solution, as long as you don’t need anything too heavy. Viewing any client also displays their associated projects and invoices, if any exist.

The Projects page allows you a fair number of options when setting projects up, including adding a relevant web site, which is particularly useful for web design professionals with a lot of concurrent, ongoing jobs. You can also classify projects by category, the list of which is completely customizable by the user. Once a project is created, you can add tasks and milestones, which are automatically displayed in your calendar if there are dates attached. You can also attach invoices to the project.

Timesheets in CreativePro Office are very simple. You choose a project, and optionally a task attached to that project, then you just type in the number of hours worked each day of the week, and a weekly total is automatically generated. You can also add comments to each day, in case something needs annotation. This data can then be used to automatically generate reports. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like you can attach a timesheet report to an invoice, which is something I like to do for greater reporting transparency, depending on the client.

I do like the invoicing interface overall, however, which is found under the Finances tab. It’s simple, but you can still customize things like the type of item invoiced, whether you’re billing by hour, by day, or by product. You can also keep track of expenses from the Finances page, something invoicing software alone doesn’t usually offer.

For my purposes — small consulting, design, and editing projects — CreativePro Office is as close as I’ve come to a perfect all-in-one solution. I’m still too nervous to trust everything to the web, but with the easy ability to print paper and PDF backups, it might just become my primary project management tool.

Does CreativePro Office meet your project management, time tracking, invoicing and quoting needs?

I really like the idea of being able to extract that useful information without having to manually copy and paste, though, so when Nicholas Maddix of Textual emailed me to tell me about Anagram, a similar Windows app, and it was also recommended by a couple of commenters on our gwabbit review, I thought I’d check it out.

Anagram is like gwabbit in that you can use it to extract contact data from emails. However, it’s more flexible, in that you can use it to capture information from any text, not just emails, and it’s not restricted to contacts: Anagram will examine any text you throw at it and automatically attempt to capture calendar events, to-do items and notes, too. Here’s a quick screencast of it in action capturing some contact data and adding a calendar event to Outlook: WebWorkerDaily Screencast: Anagram from Simon Mackie on Vimeo.

Unlike gwabbit, Anagram is not limited to Outlook. It can work with a variety of different target applications:

• Microsoft Outlook
• Salesforce.com
• Jigsaw
• Palm Desktop/Agendus
• NetSuite

Anagram works very well and it’s very easy to use, too. You activate Anagram by highlighting your target text snippet (this can be in an email, on a web site or in a document), then hitting a hotkey combination. By default, the hotkey is tapping ctrl-c quickly twice in succession, which I think feels very natural, but you can change it to a function key if you prefer. Anagram parses the text, figures out what type of information the text contains, launches the target app (if it’s not already open) and populates the fields automatically. All you have to do is check that the information is correct and save the data. In my tests, it was very accurate with little to no manual intervention required. Anagram is a simple app, but if you use one of its target applications and find copying and pasting contact information a chore, it’s definitely worth a try.

Anagram is Windows-only and available as a free 45-day trial. After that, pricing depends on usage and will cost $34.95 for Anagram Personal or $74.95 per year for Anagram CRM.

Do you use Anagram or a similar app?

Relenta aims to replace your web-based email and popular CRM apps like Salesforce and SugarCRM, all in one convenient package. It offers the same features as these apps, but with tight integration with your email and task management software as well, since it’s all managed from the same central location. That kind of streamlining is priceless in the web working world, when keeping tabs on so many different apps can quickly become an overwhelming chore.

The email client that’s included with Relenta allows you to use your own existing company domain name, and gives you the option of sharing email, so that multiple people can share a single alias, like info@yourcompany.com. Combined with the calendar and task manager, staff using shared email accounts can see exactly what’s been attended to, by whom, on what date, and whether or not any follow-up action is required. It also resembles desktop clients in its physical layout, and provides quick access to contacts in the left-hand menu, so it’s a comfortable environment to work from.

From the same central dashboard, you can access your contacts list, which displays a list of truncated entries in its default view. Contacts can be created from directly within the web view, or imported from existing sources via CSV files, like those exported by most programs and web-based clients. Clicking on any contact entry in your list expands that item and displays detailed information, including all the fields you’d expect if you use Apple’s or Outlook’s address book applications.

Each contact can also be assigned tags, which provides another useful sorting method that transcends organization or other common groups. And, true to their goal of intertwining contact management, email and tasks, you can instantly attach an activity to anyone, and view any emails that may have been sent or received from the contact inline, without having to switch to the Email tab.

Under the Calendar tab, you can see your upcoming appointments. Each event has its task type in front of its name of the event, and has a column listing guests or contacts from your address book. Clicking on them displays their contact details, food preferences, and other notes, and shows an activity stream of what you’ve done with that client in the past.

Relenta also offers a file manager and an email campaign manager. You can customize your email campaigns, allow people to unsubscribe, and set up various templates all from within Relenta with no prior experience of email marketing required. The file manager is very basic, offering no inline viewer, and only the ability to download, delete and rename files, but that should be all you need out of this kind of app. The ability to attach files you’ve uploaded is also available, which is a big plus if you’re not at your home computer.

As a full-featured, yet simple and direct CRM tool, I think web workers, and especially whose who do a lot of sales-related work, will really appreciate Relenta. It keeps everything together and tightly integrated for those of you who love organization. Personally, I like how it enables me to keep everything nicely contained within my browser, so that if I need a break, all I have to do is quit Firefox and the air is cleared.

Relenta offers a free 14-day trial, and quarterly ($20/month) or monthly($25/month) pricing plans for the full version after that. I tested the demo. There’s also a free version, though, that they tuck away under the paid options, which limits you to 1 user, 100MB storage, and 100 contacts, but if you’re a freelancer working solo, that might be all you need.

What do you use for CRM?

The new version concentrates on adding pervasive support for tagging, but there are some other changes too. Merging contacts and leads together will further simplify things, and increasing the limits on some of their plans is a welcome move. If you sign up for a free trial account with the code WWD, they’ll enter you in a drawing for a free year’s subscription as well.

While I applaud them for the added functionality, I think the limitations they have placed on their use in some of their plans are a bit restrictive. For example, those on a standard $24/month 6 user Small Business plan only get the ability to track 5 open deals. It is true that only active deals count towards that figure, but 5 deals in a sales pipeline for a 6 user team isn’t likely to be sufficient. Want more? Pro and Plus plans give you unlimited Deals but start at double the monthly fee.

I certainly understand the tiered pricing model of web services but I don’t see the point of introducing such useful new functionality and then so severely limiting its usage. I do hope they reconsider and up that number so that even those with the mid-level accounts can benefit from them.

How do you track your deals?

JOBLOGS is what I would call a collaboration and communication manager, but one specifically designed for service oriented businesses. Encompassing CRM functionality with a private workspace for collaboration, JOBLOGS is a central place for all information related to a specific client, process, or project.

Use JOBLOGS to capture events, actions, files, and notes and then quickly tie this information to clients, people or projects. They use the concept of Blogs which was a bit confusing at first, but they don’t mean Blogs in the traditional sense. In JOBLOGS, a blog is essentially a container for a project or transaction. It can be affiliated with a client or company and has its own set of actions and events. Publish it externally and it becomes a collaboration hub. The permission system dictates the level of interaction available.

JOBLOGS looks and feels a lot like a desktop application. Different components of the application appear in their own resizable windows. You even have the ability to choose a wallpaper and retrieve items from a trash bin.

I particularly appreciated how customizable the data forms are. I was able to easily create new data fields to capture the specific information I might need for my business. Fields can be dragged and dropped to change the order.

The interface is comfortable and incredibly responsive. There are no page refreshes and no save buttons. Queries run quickly and it is terribly easy to customize the display of information. Data import and export options are plentiful.

The folks at JOBLOGS really seem to have thought of everything a small group would need to communicate and collaborate. By combining disparate services into one package, it really does become a central hub for everything one might need to keep day to day operations as well as specific projects running smoothly. A demo video runs through things and should give you a good idea of how things look and feel.

JOBLOGS plans start at Free for a basic single user option up to a $149 Pro option. A 30 day trial is available for all plans.

Is there a place for JOBLOGS in your business?