Contact Management - Document Management Information
The information making up the audit trails of your business relationships can be scattered across in-trays, files and folders, filing cabinets, notebooks, diaries, post-it notes, remote hard drives, electronic organisers, email systems, fax systems, spreadsheets, databases etc.
As a primary container of business information, a document is a key element of an audit trail of business decisions and transactions. Document management systems can therefore help deliver a structured history of activity. However, procedures will not always exist to ensure that every form of action is recorded in a document: for example, telephone call notes, meeting reports, internal decisions and communications, miscellaneous actions. A business may well utilise a contact management or CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system to record such details. To ensure integrated access to audit trail records and ease of reproduction, it is therefore important to assess the overall requirements for document and contact management.
Integration between a document management system and a contact management application will also include considerations relating to document production. For example, many contact management solutions will mange document templates, letter production and mail merges, linking with your chosen word processor to automatically include name, address and data values.
Many contact management systems will also manage incoming and outgoing email, including these records within the contact history and facilitating quick access to email history via contact look-up. You may wish to compare the features offered by contact and document management applications in terms of accessibility, completeness and security. Please also see the section on email features.
Smaller Business Contact Management/CRM solutions:
For an overall picture, including product list and searches, see crm4sme
GoldMine from FrontRange Solutions
ACT! and SalesLogix from Sage
Maximizer from Multiactive
Prospect Manager from Access Accounts
FastTrack from AXLR8
Commence from Commence Corporation
UK SMEs should look at CREAM from Benchmark Software
