Category Archives: DejaOffice PC CRM

CompanionLink and DejaOffice Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin)

Posted on by Wayland Bruns
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I have a Love/Hate relationship with Social Media. Well, mostly Hate. My personal preferences are definitely toward having a quiet security based on using public information sources carefully. I don’t really like the idea of having a personal billboard that broadcasts my info to anyone whether I know them or not.

It has become strategic for CompanionLink Software to begin advertising on Social Media networks. It has become the case that business people use Facebook and Twitter and this is a great platform to get the word out about our products. So it is important for us to make this into a platform that is useful to our customers for ongoing communication.

We definitely want our platform to be useful. It is not our mission to do nothing but promote product sales. We want to convey our process in building our products, in using them, and relate any information that helps our customers. If we make a feed that is useful to our subscribers, then this will be a great landing page for our advertisements. At least that is the goal.

CompanionLink – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn

CompanionLink’s media pages are: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. For the most part we post identical content on these, and so you only need to subscribe to one of them. Our goal is to start posting about twice a week. Posts will be centered on our PC Sync products; Sync Outlook Calendar to Android, Sync Outlook Calendar to iPhone, Sync Google Calendar with Outlook. Since DejaOffice CRM on Android and iPhone is part of this, we will add some tips and tricks for that. We will highlight program updates and appropriate videos.

DejaOffice – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn

DejaOffice has a parallel presence, and we will use this to promote our new DejaOffice PC CRM product (DPC). Some of the articles will line up with the CompanionLink content. But our focus for DejaOffice is for people who are moving toward using DejaOffice CRM on PC, Android and iPhone.

Tech Support and Comments

As always, our best tech support response is from using our normal tech channels. We come in every day and respond to about 100 emails and 80 phone calls. This is a lot of work. Unfortunately it adds to our work the numerous other ways people use to contact us. For DejaOffice, don’t forget the DejaOffice Forum which is open 24×7 and is customer supported. For CompanionLink and DejaOffice email and phone support our hours are 7am-3:30pm Pacific Time Monday through Friday.

Affiliate Opportunities with DejaOffice PC CRM

Posted on by Wayland Bruns
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DejaOffice PC CRM is a unique opportunity. Released in 2019, it can capture a new market customer who are looking for a fast, secure, on-premise CRM program.

It is ideally suited for customers who are a single-person business, and small companies up to 25 sales people. DejaOffice is PC based, the database is local on your hard disk. This makes it unique in the modern CRM marketplace which is almost entirely cloud based.

Affiliate Sales for Business CRM Customers

We offer an Affiliate program that will pay 20% back for every recommendation you make for Business CRM Customers. A Business license generally runs $99 for the Outlook version, $129 for the “Express” CRM and $199 for the 5-User license. So the Affiliate payment is $20, $25 and $40 respectively. You get this in the month following your customer’s purchase. You need do nothing more than promote the program with your link and you get credit for every purchase.

Service business for Localized CRM Customers

DejaOffice is fully Unicode compliant and currently localized with 12 languages. We will work with vendors to produce more localized versions. This allows you to promote DejaOffice for your own community in your own language. You can then become the support representative for your area, deriving sales and revenue by providing technical assistance.

For instance, a Latvian business may wish to set up a Latvian website to promote and sell DejaOffice in the Latvian language. We will assist in working with you to build your language into DejaOffice PC CRM, and Android and iPhone CRM products. Once built, we will maintain these languages in our product releases.

In addition to Affiliate sales, you will find that customers readily need assistance with technical issues, moving databases, and connecting the DejaOffice data to their other business systems. You can easily set up a fee based service business handling this type of service.

To Sign up as an affiliate partner click here. Please write to us about any opportunities you would like to pursue. We are happy to partner with everyone.

about any opportunities you would like to pursue. We are happy to partner with everyone.

. Please write to us about any opportunities you would like to pursue. We are happy to partner with everyone.

Why DejaOffice PC CRM is the Best CRM for 2019

Posted on by Wayland Bruns
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Salesforce has made CRM synonymous with Cloud Computing. However, Cloud Computing has a number of obvious flaws, and for many small business owners, PC based CRM is the right solution.

For people who have fewer than 20,000 customers, and want to track history, events and tasks for those customers, a cloud based solution may be too slow and cumbersome. Business people are quite obviously focused on their business. They lack the time to learn slow and cumbersome tools more suited to large corporation with 200,000 customers.

Every small business person has a PC. This is essential for basic tools like accounting, printing, taxes, regulatory filing, and processing orders. Small business is not a game that can be run on an app on your phone. It is a serious endeavor that requires effective records and communications.

Since you have a PC, why do your customer management in the cloud?

Cloud based solutions have the following flaws:

  1. Cloud CRM is slow to use. It takes time to open your browser, search for a customer, schedule a follow up, and make call notes.
  2. Cloud CRM is expensive. Decent cloud solutions are priced by the month often costing $200 per year or more. If you do not pay, you do not get access to your data. While Zoho and Hubspot offer free alternatives, they are limited in scope.
  3. Cloud CRM is not secure. The first thing that Salesforce, Hubspot and other CRM products do is to connect your data to Google, which will make money by selling it, or Microsoft, which is renown for data leaks.
  4. Cloud CRM Mobile Apps perform poorly on the road. Very few Cloud CRM products support free mobile apps, and those that do offer limited browsing and phone capability. Many are not true apps at all but simply a web browser view to the online database. If you are out of range, you cannot make notes about your meeting.

DejaOffice absolutely solves these issues:

  1. DejaOffice is lighting fast. You can answer the phone, search for a contact, schedule a meeting and make call notes in less than 10 seconds. DejaOffice is always available on your PC, even if your internet is not connected.
  2. DejaOffice PC CRM is available for a one-time low price.
  3. DejaOffice PC CRM can encrypt the database, and makes automatic backups of your database. You can be secure that your data is local, safe, and protected.
  4. DejaOffice CRM for Android and iPhone are true Apps that are well rated and have local data. They run fast, and integrate with native phone capabilities. You can download DejaOffice from the App Store now.

DejaOffice PC CRM comes in four flavors:

Standalone – for Contacts, Calendar, Tasks and Notes on your PC.

Outlook Add-In – For those that use Outlook as a primary customer management tool, and Add-In that automates creating Contacts, Calendar and History from your Email Inbox.

Express – Complete CRM Tracking that includes Deals (Opportunities) and integration with leading CRM tools like Act! and Goldmine.

Pro – Five User license with the Express capabilities.

Each of these versions has a free two week trial. Also available are RunStart and Premium Support service where we will assist you to import your existing data and switch over to this new PC based CRM tool.

WSJ Shockingly Good Phone article features Nokia 7.1

Posted on by Wayland Bruns
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The Wall Street Journal published a great article this week called: Shockingly Good Smartphones You Can Get for $350 or Less (WSJ -Paywall).

It makes a point that we tend to think of first-run phones as being $1000. But that there is a variety of Mid-Priced phones that are pretty effective.

The main recommendation is Nokia 7.1 which happens to be one of my favorite phones. As the Article points out, it is a good modern phone running Android Oreo 8.1, with a nice screen, good camera and is pretty free of the bloatware that comes on Android devices.

The other featured phones in the article are the Lenovo Moto G7, and the Xiaomi Pocophone F1.

For all the mid-range phones, you can download DejaOffice from the Android App Store, and easily set up CompanionLink for Outlook to synchronize Outlook to the phone. DejaOffice for Android features widgets for the Android home screen to show your calendar, Category colors on Calendar, and integrated Tasks and Contacts so your whole work desktop is in one place on your phone.

It’s great to see Nokia is back to making great main stream phones again!

CompanionLink for Outlook
Average User Rating:
Average rating: 4.83 out of 5 based on 660 reviews.
Free 14 day trial. Price $14.95 3-Mo Subs - $69.95 One-time License.

Case Study: Migrate from Microsoft BCM to DejaOffice PC CRM for Outlook

Posted on by Wayland Bruns
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Recently we were approached by a customer who used to use BCM, and wanted a solution that worked with Office 365.

The customer had used Microsoft Business Contact Manager from 2013 to 2018. They had Contacts, Accounts and Communication History. This customer had tried a migration tool to move BCM contacts to Office 365 contacts. This tool was not successful. (CompanionLink Professional can move BCM Contacts to Outlook contacts using a folder-to-folder sync.)

At the time the customer contacted us, they had not used BCM for many months. So the BCM database was out of date.

Our new product DejaOffice PC CRM for Outlook adds certain CRM functions to Office 365 Outlook (Outlook 2019). Among these functions are History Also, DejaOffice can import from older CRM systems like Microsoft BCM which was discontinued in 2016.

The customer also purchased Premium Support, which is a service where our technician could log into his computer and set everything up.

What we did was Sync the old BCM database to DejaCloud. We moved the Accounts, Contacts and Communication History. Then on the new computer, the customer installed DejaOffice PC CRM for Outlook. In addition, the customer uses a Mobile Phone and DejaOffice has the complete database there also.

The entire operation of moving the old database to DejaCloud, and sync to the new PC took our technician about 30 minutes. Most of this time was checking the data each step of the way. The actual sync time was about five minutes for both sync phases.

Now, the customer can make a new contact from an Outlook email. When they look up a Contacts, they an see the communications history imported from the old PC. And they have Caller ID and History on their Phone.

Here is a link to order this same service – DejaOffice PC CRM for Outlook along with Premium installation and one year of support. Give us a call at (503)243-3400 to schedule an installation or talk about your needs.

DejaOffice PC CRM Standalone
Average User Rating:
Average rating: 4.83 out of 5 based on 660 reviews.
Free 14 day trial. Price $69.95



An Ode to Ecco Pro

Posted on by Wayland Bruns
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As we begin the rollout of DejaOffice PC CRM, some of the pioneers of small business Contact managers are on my mind.

A caller this week mentioned Ecco Pro, which was a very popular program back in the mid 1990s.

Ecco Pro as I recall was built on a foundation of an outline manager. Originally it was only an outliner. As it grew, there was a Contacts, Calendar, Task and Notes application. Originally published by Arabesque software, the company got purchased by NetManage in Seattle.

I don’t recall that it was very expensive at the time. Maybe $99 or $59 or something like that. I never used it. At the time we were working primarily with TeleMagic (DOS) and GoldMine (DOS). Both TeleMagic and GoldMine used dBase II format files, an so it was easy to make add-on products. Ecco had a proprietary file format.

By 1997 Ecco Pro had about a million users. Inexplicably, NetManage closed down the entire program. There were rumors for years that someone would buy it, but no on ever did. Ecco died a corporate death; sold to a company that did not know what they had.

Douglas P. Rice has a great writeup about being hired by NetManage just before the big fccollapse.  We don’t often think about how software was sold before the internet was commonly used, and it’s funny to read that they did not ship product updates online.

More resources:

James Kendrick – Memory Lane – Ecco Pro

Wikipedia – Ecco Pro

EccoMAGIC – EccoMagic Forums

A decade after Ecco went off the market, the Ecco User’s Group approached CompanionLink to write a sync to Phones at that time (BlackBerry, Pocket PC).  I was staunchly against it. First, there is no API. Second, the user base could not grow; only shrink. The CompanionLink Meme is to provide free telephone technical support to our customers. Some call this foolish, but I feel that many people need the help from time to time. But I don’t want to get caught getting unlimited phone calls for an unsupported product.

For those that wanted Ecco Pro to be a Contact Manager, we finally have a new product for you. DejaOffice PC CRM Standalone will handle Contacts, Calendar, Tasks and Notes, and synchronize them easily to Android and iPhone. At $49.95 we hope it can be a worthy successor to this industry pioneer.

DejaOffice PC CRM Standalone
Average User Rating:
Average rating: 4.83 out of 5 based on 660 reviews.
Free 14 day trial. Price $69.95

DejaOffice PC CRM – Beta Released!

Posted on by Wayland Bruns
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Having spent nearly 6 months developing this, it is a great moment for us.  The first time we can show what we have been working on!

Download to try it out yourself:  https://www.companionlink.com/downloads/download-dpc.php

Setup guide:  https://www.companionlink.com/support/kb/DejaOffice_PC_CRM_Sync_Setup_Guide

This is a 14 day demo but we are happy to extend the demo.  We are looking for feedback and ideas.

Tech Support:  (503)243-5200 hours – 7am-3:30pm
or Email:  support@companionlink.com

Sales (503)243-3400 – sales@companionlink.com

Forums:  https://www.dejaoffice.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?36-DejaOffice-PC-CRM-(DPC)-for-Windows

Video:

 

Thank you all for your support!

 

DejaOffice PC CRM Standalone
Average User Rating:
Average rating: 4.83 out of 5 based on 660 reviews.
Free 14 day trial. Price $69.95