DocHaven & CRMHaven Review
by David Cox
(Derby, United Kingdom)
CRMHaven
DocHaven Review
Apple, IBM and Microsoft have provided us with a great ability to share our files with services such as Personal File Sharing, SharePoint, Lotus Notes, X-Servers, FTP and .Mac. But none of these products allow us to easily or cheaply collaborate on projects because we don't know who is working on what document. Usually we get over these problems by emailing files around, but this not only increases storage but jeopardises whether we have the documents with the latest changes.
DocHaven solves not only all these problems with extensive security (login password, users, groups & clients) and multiple versions, but has a Twitter-like, speech-based messaging system for sending messages to other user account or email-based SMS services, a method of making cashless payments and a CRM.
The CRM is the most extensive module and divides your clients into groups. Each group includes unlimited surveys, priorities, relationship, type, category, source and seven types of events and keywords to help identify clients. Searching fields is done in one of three ways: drilling down inside those clients currently being viewed, a single general search field called SpotFind that works like Apple's Spotlight, and a 4-level search function to search among the 50 client fields.
Once a set of clients are discovered they are 'marked'. These clients can now have one of 46 actions applied to them. Apart from setting client values en masse, actions include import and export from Excel, checking for duplicates, sending eMailshots, merging with Word or Excel and displaying client addresses inGoogle Maps.
Not only is DocHaven simple to use, but all of the DMS, CRM, cash register and messaging systems display identically on Macintosh, Windows and Linux systems. Installations can be run in a single computer, non-networked, standalone way linking to an SQLite database for $US20. Should you need to share your CRM or contacts, then you can move the system onto a MySQL server for $20 per user. But if you don't want to set up your own server, you can store your CRM and documents on the Cloud. The Cloud supports an unlimited number of users (within reason), but is charged per gigabyte of server space per year. Bandwidth is unlimited and solutions start from $100.
