Others say...

"So far so good"
Well- I have been enjoying this product quite a lot. I effortlessly linked this to my quickbooks contacts. I had been saving them to excel then importing them to Outlook. Yeah, yeah I know there is probably an easier way, but it worked for me BUT...

then I needed to actually use this contact info... beyond just sending emails. So, it was a rather complicated mess of linking the contact to a task in order to keep track of who I sent what to and who needed to be contacted later and so on. It was a cumbersome mess!

I spent plenty of time looking for good customer relations management tools. There are some good ones out there, but they far more expensive and do a lot more than I will ever need. I am one person, not a big company. Then I thought, well what the heck, let's just see if there isn't something out there that would be compatible with QB since it also tells me what the customer bought (big spenders etc).

Here it is- QBCM and I like it mighty fine. I am also using it as my calendar. I have never really liked Outlooks calendar, but I think QBCM's is more user friendly. When looking at the home page, it gives a great multi-view of your appointments (mine include dog walking, cleaning etc.) It is not necessarily just for business.

"Be careful - Serious display DPI resolution issue"
I have used, or should say TRIED to use, this product though version 1.x, 2.x and now 2.5. When it works it is very useful. My trial of version 2.5 went very well so I purchased the upgrade. The day my purchased version was on the UPS truck I moved the balance of my customer data into the trial version. I went to look at the "Names" tab and had a big red "X" across the screen. Several calls to tech support later I found that the computer screen font resolution - actually the "DPI" setting **MUST** be 96 DPI or the software will corrupt the database. I have a high end notebook with a screen resolution of 1680x1050 and my DPI setting was set to 120 so the fonts and icons were more readable. I have about 60 programs running on the same computer that run fine at 120 DPI and there is NO REASON WHY I SHOULD HAVE TO CHANGE IT TO FIT THE SOFTWARE.

The result >> The database I had been loading and working with for about 25 days AND the balance of it I had just put it were trashed! It took me over 6 hours to reload, resysnc and cleanup the data in Outlook, QuickBooks and Customer Manager. Even after that Customer Manager stills trys to push what it thinks is customer info that it got from Outlook into QuickBooks - even though there is nothing in the records that would indicate it is customer data (no groups or categories even remotely flagged as "customer".)

One thing that should make you suspicious is that when you call QuickBooks tech support option >>> #1 <<< is for Customer manager support!

So... If you can get this SW to work for you it can be quite useful - even with all the *&%^ above I am going to try it one last time. Its amazing how a company who makes such good accounting software can still be putting out this SW with so many quirks in it.

Beware and Be careful if you use this software!

"No network support"
We received this and even reading the box it was not clear if it really supported networking. We called Intuit, finally, before installing (Intuit won't accept a return once their products are installed - you can't 'give back' the license as you can with adobe software, so no one else can ever license it either, but that's a separate annoyance). To our shock there is no way to share data files on a network. This makes the product useless in our case, or by anyone with more than one user. We returned it unopened for a refund. Intuit did make some vague statement that they were working on a better version. We hope so... as is, it's not ready for us to use.

"Badly implemented software / Badly needed software"
Perhaps for a single user environment this may be good enough software. However, as soon as you add more users the synchronization process is awful. First you need to synchronize with Quickbooks, and then synchronize with the "depot" (i.e. other Customer Manager users). Many times data is garbled or duplicated during the synchronization process. We spend sometimes hours cleaning up the garbled/duplicated data. Why wouldn't Intuit integrate the Customer Manager program completely into Quickbooks and make it a truly multi-user program?

Another annoying problem: Users can only view e-mails that they saved into a Customer or Project folder if those were saved by themselves. That is, the program does not save the data into the database but rather save a link to the Outlook program of the user. One user cannot view e-mails saved by another users.


"Great for Small Business"
If you have a small business, this is the tool for you. We simply needed to keep track of our customers. Name, address, phone number, date of birth, place of employment, and type of products we have sold to them. You can put them in catagories, you can print labels, and import from your other Quickbooks programs..if you use them. Very simple and easy to use. Great search feature too. This is just a basic way to keep track of your customers on the computer. Nothing fancy no bells and whistles. Basics that work.