My office has been using Daylite for over a year now and I must say that I am disappointed by the lack of support and by the cumbersome upgrade path for this product. I have been using Macs since 1984 and your upgrade path is a very unfriendly approach.

We use Daylite on a server and many of our users are in remote locations. This constant requirement to upgrade the database schema is annoying and fraught with potential error. You need a way to easily upgrade the server and clients and automatically convert the databases without having to coordinate with every sales person. We only have 6 users and upgrades are a nightmare. What if we had 50? I could not do it.

As for support, it is practically impossible to get a good response. Companies need service, especially at first, and it is unreasonable to expect people to have to hire a consultant for service. I recommended Daylite to another company. They had trouble getting the server to work and they almost sent it all back. Fortunately someone at their office realized that the server was going to sleep, which is why the connection was being lost. This should have been debugged by the Daylite rep.

I stuck my neck out to recommend Daylite in our 6-salesperson company and now people are wondering if they should switch back to ACT. It is amazing to me that they found ACT easier to use!

This company is being run as if by a group of geeks. That's fine if your only customers are geeks, but I do not think that that is where you want to go.

I am writing this because I really like your product and would like to see it evolve to being not just the best Mac-based sales management tool, but the best overall. I hope that you take these suggestions to heart and work on improving what you have.

Does anyone else share my sentiments on this issue?

No, I, for one, do NOT share your sentiments. Marketcircle has an excellent product, the best affordable CRM on the Mac platform, in my opinion, and their support for us has been good in general.

As with most software companies, you have the option to purchase paid support plans, which we do at my company - and normally we can reach a support person quickly and most issues are resolved with one or two calls. Now and then there will be a particularly difficult problem, or something that is hard to reproduce, that may take more work, but again, Marketcircle nearly always comes through for us and if they discover an actual bug in the program, in every case they have fixed it in a subsequent release.

Furthermore, Marketcircle has implemented MANY feature requests that I have made in the past including Boolean searches (as now found in SmartLists), expanded import capabilities and other things that were essential for my business and would have been deal-breakers for me in using Daylite.

As far as changing the database schema - that would be necessary for any database-driven application when changes to the design were made to improve the program or add features. SO I fail to see why you take Marketcircle to task for this.

I take exception to your characterizing Marketcircle as "being run as if by a group of geeks." What an insult to people who put out a fine product and are in fact responsive to the needs of most users. Sure, they are not perfect, but realize that they have had a monumental task in creating such a feature-rich application from scratch and have had the good graces to do it on the Mac platform, thus making the Mac a truly viable business platform for small-to-medium-sized businesses that once had to rely on Windoze and put up with all of the nightmares that go along with living in a Microsoft universe.

Any company can always do better, take the next step up in customer service and so forth, but in our experience, Marketcircle has done a good job supporting a phenomenal, ever-improving product, and we plan to stay with them for the long haul.

And we do happily recommend Daylite to other businesses.

quote:

This company is being run as if by a group of geeks.

Dear Emiliano:
Steep learning curve, certainly. Best CRM application for my Mac: certainly. Do I know where everything is?: certainly. Do I remember V1.0?: certainly. Will I continue using DL?: Certainly. Will I recommend using DL?: certainly. Geeks?: *absolutely* not. (Absolutely is in asterisks as I did not want to use capitals, some might think that I was shouting, which of course I'm not)
All the best.
Rodrigo Salazar-Botero Botero

As a power user I can easily take for granted my own ease with products. Personally I do not have an issue with Marketcircle, nor with Daylite, but it has been an issue as soon as I involved other people who are not as familiar with technology. I do not use ACT but that my colleagues said they think ACT was easier to use seems to me like the real insult. I wonder if this is true. I cannot assume that my colleagues are a-typical of the general user out there.

Also, although my comments seem harsh, I took the time and effort to write them not for my own edification but in order to start an honest and hopefully constructive discussion. I want Marketcircle to prosper and I, personally, love using Daylite.

Do we have any people who have switched from the PC and/or have used ACT, and who would like to add their comments?

I for one will add my comments to this.

Before switching to Daylite3, we were using maximizer, a program which I found to be very top heavy and hard to use. The support for that product was impossible to get, and the interface was bulky and hard to learn. I never did really use it well.

We needed to upgrade to a server based solution, so we could share on several laptops when we were out of the office. The software licensing alone was more than the cost of daylite3 AND a new macbook for each of us. So we made the switch to mac and daylite3.

I am not a "geek", and I do not have the time to learn all about a new system AND run our business, so we hired a consultant to make the transition.

Best move we ever made. Period. He got us up and running, transitioned our current data (we actually installed Maximizer running on parallels so we would not have to pay to transition all our old data to our main servers, this saved a fair bit of work). He had us up and running in one morning.

Do I know everything about daylite3? Nope, not yet. Is it faster and easier to learn than Maximizer was? Certainly. Do I log onto this forum to learn more about using and troubleshooting daylite3? Whenever I have a question.

Is it absolutely perfect? Well not yet, but neither was anything else we could find. And Marketcircle seems to spend a good deal of time working on upgrades that users ask for.

Overall it is and continues to be the answer for us to run our business on Mac and enjoy all the mac benefits.

There are certain things that I would like to see, but many of them are either in the works, or I simply need to update (ie changing my cumbersome blackberry for an iPhone when they are available in Canada, legal please with no modifications).

If you are having problems with something in Daylite3 I would highly recommend using a consultant recommended by Marketcircle. If your run your business like we do, it allows you to concentrate on business and not fixing computers, besides it is a business expense.

Besides, we will never spend the same as we spent repairing windows problems and have had no downtime or lost work since switching.

Having just had our consultant switch us to mac book airs, we continue to be very happy with Daylite3 and our mac systems.