Peter,
I've found myself in a similar situation and haven't found the perfect
solution. Currently we have a database on our intranet that has the email
addresses of various people we send stuff to. This was a Q&D (quick and
dirty) kludge that I threw together for the marketing people that has now
grown way past its original specs and needs reworking. They also have a
contact management database on an old mainframe which is being replaced.
This contact management system started off as a membership style database
that then had a bunch of stuff slapped onto it. The new system which they
are implementing for their bibliographic database is on a solaris system
(software is STAR by Cuadra). While STAR is great for the library
application, it doesn't have the necessary *connectors* to easily print
labels, fax or email directly from it.
All this to bring me back to the real requirement which is: contact
management system that is also a marketing database which needs to:
* track email to and from clients and potential clients
* track faxes sent to clients
* track info packages sent to clients
* track relationships between clients (ie. 3-4 contacts in different areas
of a university but still must be treated as "contacting that university")
* be in a format that can easily be exported should we switch applications
later
* print labels for particular groups and record the action
* send faxes to particular groups and record action
* send email to particular groups and record action
I've looked at various solutions and they all fail to meet all of my
requirements, though they all handle some aspect really well. I can't see
this as being a new need and there's got to be something out there that
handles all this. Sure I could write something, but given my usual
workload, this isn't going to happen anytime soon.
The network is NT and WIN95 with one SunUltra running Solaris (old system
was HP3000). If you run across something interesting let me know. I'd
even settle for close and can be modified.
--
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Susan Duncan ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Voice: (613) 744-3283
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