With the success and dominance of Microsoft Outlook as the corporate
standard for E-mail in the 90’s and beyond, many desktop CRM applications including Act! CRM are designed
with Outlook as the favoured integration for e-mail recording. Use of older Internet
Mail clients included with CRM systems declined as service providers demanded use
of secure channels where log-on and password were not sent in plain text, prone
to ease of interception. Outlook provided that with support for SSL.
The introduction of webmail and the convenience of browser
access brought freedom from needing to be at your desktop to create and view
email. This presented a problem for conventional desktop CRM; how to capture all
email transactions in a contact history irrespective of where the email was
sent from, or the type of device and what email client was used.
With the increased popularity of Gmail, Sage the owners of
Act! CRM at the time provided a partial integration with Gmail. However to
avoid duplicate data you could not have both Outlook and Gmail integration
active together and unfortunately the nature of Act!’s Internet Mail client
would not allow it to be used as a client for Gmail so it lacked a Gmail Inbox view within Act!. Also lacking was the
convenience of simply clicking on an email address in Act! to trigger
the opening of a Create Message window for Gmail in your browser. Thus it was
integration with Gmail of sorts but limited and lacked the workflow that Outloo users were used to. Email sent through Gmail
where there was a common email address with Act! would record the history into Act! through synchronisation.
Beyond the challenges of Gmail with the upsurge in mobile
computing, highly mobile users carrying multiple devices such as laptops, tablets and smartphones, it becomes increasingly harder to capture all emails
and record them reliably and consistently to CRM and without duplication.
The web based CRM packages like Sugar CRM and Highrise were
early adopters of a drop-box service. A dropbox provides a common email address
which is monitored and attaches email sent to it, directly to the correct
contact record in CRM. This ensures device and email client independence by a simple CC: or Bcc: to the drop-box address on sending an email to the recipient. Email is attached to the CRM automatically
by through the regular synchronisation through the drop-box service.
Smart Inbox for Act! is a low cost subscription
software that allows you to attach email in Act! independent of the mobile device
or email client you choose. You can even have Outlook integrated to Act! as
well if you want. More information can be found at http://www.xactsoftware.co.nz/smart-inbox
