Im an end-user with experience in Act! and Goldmine, dabbling in
Maximizer- all contact management solutions- with some custom fields,
basic reports, and scheduling of todos and calendar events, linked to the
various contacts .

I know the answer is yes, but how good is FM v8 as a realistic mom-pop
contact management solution to Act! or other low-mid level CRMs?

Daily uses are calling people, logging histories of calls, next actions,
etc- your basic sales. Edpisodic email campaigns, and frequent emails
linked to contacts.

Thanks.

PS- any specific free resources out there for contact management and FM?
Like templates, ideas, best practices white papers, workflow, etc,
specifically referencing using FM pro as a step-up (?) from canned crm
like Act! and Goldmine...

Well, yes you can do all of this in FM; I created a solution that does
all of this several versions of FMP ago. Been evolving it for about a
decade. I've had a number of folks tell me that this solution is at
least as good as Act!

BUT: it takes a lot of work. FM comes with basic templates (and I mean
generally very basic) that will get you started. But you'll want to add
things like calendaring (several free templates and how-to's available
on the web; maybe Google for them), and you'll have to build the kinds
of linkages you describe. It would be an excellent exercise for learning
FM. You could do it in FM8, or you could move to Advanced and add custom
menus and some other features. You might also want a great reference
book like "Using FileMaker Pro 7 Special Edition" (available at
Amazon...http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...730286/qid=112
7792879/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/103-2138344-0168662?v=glance&s=boo
ks&n=507846).

I would think that your choice as to whether to stick with something
canned like Act!, or buying a ready-made FileMaker solution, vs building
your own, would depend on things like:
- What's your skill set with FM? And how deeply do you want to take it?
- How complex are the functions you want? The ones you listed aren't
particularly hard to build, but you may want others that are more
challenging.
- How much time do you want to devote to building the solution and then
maintaining it?
- Is your time better spent working with FM or running your business?

FileMaker's packaging includes a list of solution providers. Might be
helpful to you (no, I'm not in it; haven't been an FSA for several
years).

To gauge things, you might look at some of FMI's free templates. If you
don't already have a copy of FileMaker, just go to Filemaker.com and
request one. If you search through the site a little, you'll see options
to get free education or business starter kits with your eval copy. That
should provide you with sufficient starting materials to figure out what
you want to do, I would think.

One thing: I much prefer developing myself to buying something whenever
possible. Not only is it gratifying; I can also make it behave like I
want it to, and the only feature creep is what I put in...control can be
a good thing.

Abbott

In article <Xns96DDCD5809087edmarmailcom (AT) 69 (DOT) 28.186.158>,
Ed Marmon <unlisted@.com.com> wrote:

gives you templates and example files you can start with such as
"Contact Management", "Event Planning", and "ToDo List". Those 3 files
should show you just how easy it is to use FM.

thanks abbott, thanks a lot-
i'm taking a look at the trial and the contact managememnt templates.
something important to me is the calendaring- hundreds or thousands of
events linked to the various contacts, and histories- same, in
retrospect, just like Act! has- what calll, meeting, task, or other
perhaps custom event happened with theis contact.

im just trying to understand ho to do a tab in a contact to show
histories, and how the recording of events takes place, and how it's all
hoooked in, in separate tables.

i'm trying to pick apart the templates or samples, how it's done, and i
love figuring it out, and it's so much more elegant and powerful- doing
it yourself, but it's just a brick wall in the beginning to make the
mental leap from using histories and calendar attached to contacts, from
actually having to deisgn it, or just understand the temaple to modify it
for my own good!.... :-)