This is an overview on what I have gone through, and the different systems I have tried, in order to find a system for managing my contacts. Hopefully this will be helpful to someone else out there.
Let me start by talking a little bit about what my needs were. I have a number of contacts, and they are spread throughout the country. I keep notes about how I have communicated with people, when we talked, and what type of relationship we have. I also keep all of their contact information, and I need the ability to put in a calendar entry that tells me it’s time to get in touch again. In the past, I used a custom Filemaker Pro database and for the most part, it worked. It was ugly, it didn’t group by company, and it had no ability to attach anything to a contact, but it was workable. The straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak, was when I got a business partner who was going to be, among other things, helping with the marketing. The only way we could have used the old system was either to trade the entire database back and forth across the network, or the updates would have to be done on my computer. Neither option worked for us. I had searched in the past for another solution, but it wasn’t until this point that finding a solution became imperative.
So the search was on. Highrise from 37 Signals is pretty much the industry standard, the creative industry not the sales industry, but I don’t love the idea of a monthly fee to keep my contacts somewhere else. Most importantly though, and this would be a recurring theme in my search, it had a ton of features I didn’t need and wasn’t into paying for monthly. With that off the list, I started looking at a variety of desktop solutions. I didn’t need project management, and I didn’t need sales tools. I would think something simple and elegant would have been created by some mac only developer, but it just does not seem to be out there. I looked at Daylight from Marketcircle and it actually seemed like a pretty nice solution but it also had a hefty price tag. $229 per seat was more than I wanted to spend.
Not finding anything else in the software realm, I started looking at online services again. I looked at Sugar CRM but not for long. It says it’s open source but I don’t see anything free about it. But more importantly, they list three prominent uses for it on their site: sales force automation, marketing automation, and customer support. I didn’t think my needs fit into any of those categories, so I moved on. Now as I was looking again for this article, I see that if you click on any of those it takes you to another screen that talks about the contact management. Maybe this is a lesson in web design as it relates to conversions, regardless though, I moved on.
At some point I was at a bit of a loss, so on a whim, I decided to look in the Google Play store and see if there might be something that had an android client as well as a web client. As it turns out, there was something exactly like that and it was called Base from Future Simple. I was excited when I looked at the website. Base was a more complex CRM system that focused on moving people through the sales funnel, not what I was looking for at this point, but they also had a free component. Basically, from what I could tell, if you never moved people up through the sales funnel and instead just used the contact manager, it would be free. I was a little bit worried about their export function. If you are going to import to somewhere else, you better be able to export. I was also concerned that they seemed to list both companies and people in one place which made it rather confusing to browse. I sent them an email, and this was the start of the single strongest feature of Base. They have amazing support, not just good. They have twitter and email where you can go back and forth and have a simple conversation to answer quick questions. This is what all companies should have but only the good ones do. I learned that the export did split everything up so your notes were in one file and your contacts in another. This is what worried me, but that they both had a common ID number and they linked me to a “how to” for Excel that would recombine that data. That seemed unnecessarily complex, but apparently it’s easy to recombine, so I was okay with that. The other thing I was concerned about actually turned out to be a real strength. Any time you enter a contact with a place that they work, the system automatically enters the company information as a second entry in the database. For example, if I enter John Doe at ABC Company, it creates an entry for John Doe at ABC Company and another entry for ABC Company automatically. Once everything is there, you can filter by company or people and see only that list or you can click on a company and see everyone that works there. That was cool and it worked the same way for tags. Unlike other systems, instead of searching for a tag, you filter by the tag and that means you can filter by more than one. So I could filter by people I have had a meeting with in San Diego because those are both tags I use. In other systems I could search either San Diego or people I have met with but not both. I love that and wish someone else was doing it that way.
Okay, so I was sold at this point, and I got started on the import/export process. This turned out to be a nightmare, but it was not entirely the fault of Base. I was able to export to a csv format and Base imports from csv so it should have been fairly simple. The basic contact information was no problem, but I had planned to use their tag system in order to differentiate the type of relationship I had with someone plus I needed my notes and my “special notes” to import into their notes section. I exported my contacts into a csv file with those categories then opened it up in excel and properly titled the columns. The first time I imported I actually told the “special notes” and tags to map to custom section in the Base contact manager. I discovered doing this put the info on a second screen from the primary contact screen and made it unsearchable as well as rather unwieldy in general. So I deleted everything and imported again. This time I discovered that for some unknown reason, I suddenly had a bunch of websites as tags and no way to delete tags. I emailed their tech support again. After asking some questions and going back and forth a bit with their amazing tech support team, I learned that tag management wasn’t yet available and that they didn’t know why the import hadn’t worked right, but that they would be happy to handle the import for me. Did I mention how awesome the support is? I think it took them a day, and they emailed me when it was done. With everything in Base, I told my business partner we were all set, and we started talking about using it. This is when we noticed the things that were missing and things we couldn’t live without. The amount of data each contact could hold, number of e-mails and websites for example, was limited, though I could deal with that by using the notes. It was also kind of slow since it was online, but these issues were not the end of the world, just kind of a pain. The big thing was that I could use tags to get very targeted groups of people out of my list, but then I had no way of making a mailing list. Even if I were to do it manually, there was no easy way to move from one contact to the next and quickly copy the info I needed. Mailings is one the biggest things I do, so that pretty much killed Base. So while I really liked most things about Base it ultimately wasn’t a usable solution for me.
While I had been waiting for Base I also tried Plaxo. Plaxo imported easily enough and seemed like it might have worked, but with the number of contacts I had, it was so slow it was unusable. There isn’t much more to say about them, since I couldn’t even really explore it much.
Next, I found something called Soho Organizer from a company called Chronos. This was getting closer to the kind of elegant mac only type software I was sure was out there, but it was kind of pricey, and it didn’t do multiple users at all. I was about to move on since no multiple users would have meant it wouldn’t ultimately solve the problem that started this search, no matter how much I liked it. I noticed, however, that it did have caldav and carddav support and if that worked, then $100 per seat wasn’t so bad. So, I downloaded the trial to give it a try. The first thing I needed to do was get my contacts into a format that could be imported. It didn’t accept csv, only vcard. A quick google search turned up a very simple web based csv to vcard converter. I then proceeded to spend hours trying to get everything working correctly. The first thing that took me forever to figure out was why the categories were all messed up. It turns out that this was the same issue I had when I was working with Base. The problem was that any commas anywhere in the fields, like in the address or notes, would throw everything off. That took me a long time to figure out, but once I did, it was easy to fix. Excel had no issues with those extra commas for some reason. So, I just opened it in Excel, did a search for commas, and replaced them with a space before re-saving as a new csv and redoing the conversion. The next thing I had to figure out was how to get the tags to correctly import into Soho. Again this took a while to figure out, but wasn’t so hard once I knew what I had to do. Since tags are not part of a normal vcard file you have to add the exact phrasing that Soho does, it’s two lines and the actual tag, to the file. I used Textwrangler on the vcard file and was able to take advantage of its advanced search and replace features. Textwrangler also saved me by being able to automatically delete the second url line that the conversion added for some reason. Once I got the file all cleaned up, it imported into Soho with no issues, but I wasn’t done by a long shot.
Now that all my contacts had been converted and imported to Soho, I had to find a carddave solution. I figured there had to be something free out there for carddav and it turns out I was right. There are actually a few different things. The first one I found was owncloud.org. It’s an opensource solution that lists two service providers that offer the server side for free if you don’t want to install it on your own server. I tried both of them with the same results. They do not seem to work with Soho. It rejects the carddav server address as not having a carddav server. Next up, I found a service called Fruux. The Fruux server address seemed to be accepted, however, Soho doesn’t allow you to actually edit the contacts on the server with Fruux. That means you can edit a local copy then drag it to the server to be updated. You can’t delete from the server though, and it’s not a workable long term solution since you have to know exactly which contacts were updated and then drag and drop them back and forth. I have no idea why this is the case and neither do the guys with Fruux.
This is when I discovered that Fruux is another company with awesome tech support and Soho is a company with absolutely awful tech support. In fact, as I am writing this, 4 or 5 days later I have still not had my trouble ticket responded to by Chronos. I was pretty much ready to give up, but I kept thinking about the icloud integration that Soho had. I sat down at my computer and decided that I would pay whatever it cost for a year and upgrade to OSX 10.8 if needed. When I investigated icloud and discovered it was free I felt ridiculous. I signed up and added the icloud account to both computers and everything began to work perfectly.
At the end of nearly a week long hunt, I ended up finding that a combination of icloud as a free carddav and caldav server plus Soho Organizer 9 was the right solution for me. It’s not perfect, and I am sure that over time, I will both appreciate and hate parts of it. For now, it’s working. I do think that there is a place out there in the market for something better, so if you are working on something or you have a product that is working for you, please let me know.
