hedgehog lab

Sarat Pediredla

Announcing solomon - Small Business CRM & web-based contact manager

by Sarat Pediredla
Under News, solomon

We've been working hard at the lab on this for the past four months, so I'm extremely proud and excited to announce the launch of our latest product, solomon. solomon is a Small Business CRM and web-based contact management app designed with small businesses and freelancers in mind.

We were hoping to launch solomon in late 2009 and I know a lot of people have been waiting impatiently. We had to hold its release back for a few months to ensure the user experience was just right.

So what's in this version of solomon?

We've really focused our efforts on making solomon ultra-fast and productive. By taking full advantage of today's browser technologies, we've made sure that solomon keeps you productive by focusing on performance, ease of use and collaboration.

Our focus in version 1.0 was productivity and response time in these four main areas:

Search

We've made search super fast, so you can find your contacts quickly and effortlessly. As well as allowing you to search for your contacts by name, solomon will also allow you to search with more complex search patterns much like a lot of today's web based search engines.

Contact Management

Our main focus in this initial release has been about allowing you to manage your contacts in solomon with as little effort as possible. solomon allows you to import your contacts from industry standard Outlook CSV files and exports to both vCard and Outlook CSV. The goal here was to provide a unified address book that you can use from anywhere.

Tasks and Notes

When working with a contact in solomon, you can immediately get an overview of all of the information for that contact as well as the tasks and notes associated with them. Adding notes and tasks is a snap using a single screen interface that behaves more like a desktop application than a web app.

Mobility

We love our smart phones, and one of our goals from the outset was to make solomon truly mobile. Building on top of the solomon API, we've built an iPhone application which will allow you to take your contacts with you anywhere. The iPhone app is currently in review by Apple and should be on the App Store within days. Our native iPhone application allows you to take advantage of many of the features of the phone like calling your contact directly, sending them an email or finding their location on Google Maps. With the iPhone app, you can also keep track of the tasks you have and add notes while your'e on the move.

Where is solomon going?

We've been using solomon internally for about 2 months now and we are really happy with the experience but thats not to say we haven't got bigger plans. Far from it! Our roadmap is bursting at the seams with features we think are really going to improve solomon and we really think your'e going to like them too.

We aren't going to commit to any one feature or specific milestones at the moment until we've given our customers a chance to have their say about what they would like to see in the next version of solomon but to give you a taste of what's to come, here's a few of the features we're really excited about getting out in a coming iterations of solomon:

  • Track Cases, Leads and Deals We will be introducing more Sales Force Automation (SFA) functionality in 1.1 and 1.2, which will enable you to track leads and deals you make, keep on top of relationships using cases, and track new business.
  • Mobile apps We are working on concepts for native apps for BlackBerry and Android versions of our mobile app. We are absolutely committed to supporting multiple mobile platforms and these apps are high on our list.
  • Outlook Plug-in We know that a vast majority of small businesses use Outlook as their preferred e-mail client and we have a very exciting Outlook plug-in planned that will allow you to tie your e-mail and solomon data together.
  • E-mail Integration We will be working on advanced e-mail integration, allowing you to write and forward e-mails directly into solomon.
  • 3rd Party Integration A wider integration of your contact data with other web and desktop applications like Google Contacts and real time 2-way sync capabilities. Whether you want to view contact information in Gmail or access your tasks in Google Calendar, our planned OpenSocial integration will support this. We will also be supporting import and export from 3rd party systems and popular file formats.

If you want more information about solomon you can visit the product page or grab yourself a free copy.

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