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Yes, sometimes companies actually do something with Feature Requests

We’re pretty much addicted to Daylite at Iris, and for good reason. It’s an outstanding Contact Management System for the Mac from Marketcircle, and the amount of information we have salted away in its database is both significant and valuable.

Much of this is due to the Daylite Mail Integration feature which allows Apple Mail users to have incoming and outgoing e-mails automatically tagged with Daylite Contacts, Users, and even Projects. I can go back and see emails between a client and our team going back for years, even if  that contact (or our team member) is no longer in the picture. This is extremely useful, and we use it all the time. Every team member has Daylite on their machines, remote or not, and it’s very easy to keep them all synched together.
As cool as that is, there was one problem with the way that Daylite Mail Integration (DMI) was setup. It has to do with the way that the application automatically tagged users and contacts, and as a result it was making the feature more of a problem than a solution.

Let’s say that I’m writing an email to a client, and for whatever reason they haven’t been added to the Daylite database, so DMI would simply tag that message to me, a user on the system, and completely miss the fact that it was going to a potential contact. At least with incoming email, DMI will recognize that the contact is not in the system and would ask you if you’d like to create that contact. But outgoing mail doesn’t do that.

It just puts in with the rest of my records, and the only way to find that message in the future is to plow through all the ones that were tagged to my user account. Not so good, or useful.

So, to fix that, and to make up for my laziness in not promptly staying on top of entering clients as they contact us, I submitted a feature request to Marketcircle asking them to add an option to have DMI tag messages to only clients and projects, not users. I’m pretty sure others asked them for the same feature, but since this is our blog I’ll take credit for it.

Here’s the fix:

It’s really pretty simple. Just open up Apple Mail, then open up the Preferences from the Mail menu. Then select the “Daylite” icon for the preferences pane for DMI. There are several tabs on that window, so select the one for “Inbound”:

It’s pretty obvious how to set this up. I’ve got it so that it Auto-selects contacts but not users. I left “Auto-select project” checked just because I’m lazy. Since I don’t have a lot of projects setup in Daylite (but probably should), it’s never an issue. Even if I do have a project or opportunity associated with that client, I can always select the check box in DMI and have the message tagged to that project in Daylite.

The outbound tab needs to be changed, too:

Just close the preferences pane up, and you’re good to go.

I have no idea if this was a particularly difficult thing for Marketcircle to fix …

… but I am very thankful that they did. Now at least I get a chance to add the contact into Daylite if they don’t exist in there yet, instead of having their e-mail automatically tag itself to my user record. It’s setup very well and easy to implement, and I can tell you from experience that it works extremely well.

If you’re looking for a contact management system, groupware, or just a good shared address book, then it’s worth giving Daylite a look. There’s also an add-on for iPhone and iPod Touch users (and I guess iPad users, too) called “Daylite Touch”, and it allows you to basically carry your CRM in your pocket. But the DMI tool itself is worth the price of the application. Other contact management systems I’ve used fall far short in this area.