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A CRM is good at keeping track of all your people and organizations, as well as the communications you have with them. But one place where we’re still struggling is how to deal with files. Spreadsheets and documents are often important artifacts of the relationships we have with people and orgs.

But what to do with them? You can put them directly into your database, like Salesforce. But that’s usually pretty lame–don’t even try it with Salesforce. You can put them on some shared server space somewhere in a folder hierarchy. But that’s so 1997. No tags, no cross-referencing, no good web-based access to it.

There are a number of enterprise content management (ECM) systems out there that are pretty slick. Usually they cost about a bazillion dollars. But we are starting to see options that are web-based and affordable. Take a look at Koral.

Koral is a pretty slick web-based ECM that is much better than I remember Sharepoint being. It’s web-based, using tagging, full text indexing, etc. Pretty nice. And it has an integration with Salesforce, as well as a desktop app that makes uploading easy. It allows you to store your files online and cross-reference them to your constitutents. Pretty nice.

Ismail just wrote about ECM and where he thinks it needs to go, with some more info on Koral. We haven’t made the switch from our windows file structure, but we’re considering it. I’ll post with an update if it rises to a priority where we act on it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007 at 3:04 pm and is filed under CRM, Technology. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.