CRMs are so slow .....

One thing that has been frustrating me of late is that every single Customer Relationship Management system that I have tried is so incredibly slow ...

Years ago I used Maximizer and ACT. While I complained a bit about the lack of advanced features and occasional bug, one thing I never complained about was the speed. Running fully on the desktop, these programs enabled you to talk on the phone to customers while you recorded notes and made calcultations in real-time. Yet ever since ACT 6 or 7 (I can't remember which) this great product went to the dogs because it ran Microsoft SQL Server, .NET and bloated the system with memory issues slowing the whole thing down to a snails pace such that it became completely unusable. You'd spend minutes watching hourglasses while your customers would hang up in your face.

Since then I've gone through all sorts of web based CRM systems, which have the same interface issues. SugarCRM, vTiger, and basically come to the conclusion that they all suck. When you don't want to use them hosted and install them locally, you can add plenty of support headaches to the list.

My latest brainwave was to go back to basics and try Microsoft Business Contact Manager for Outlook. I've been using it for a while and though it offers the functionality and features I'm after I've found that it also runs incredibly slowly. Such that I'm going through the same headaches all over again. My laptop hardware should be more than up to the task, but somehow I'm doubting it is a hardware problem and once again I find myself suffering from "Slow CRM Syndrome".

I'm reluctant to even try the high end systems, because from what I've seen they are really no better in terms of performance.

There must be a huge market for a slick, fast CRM that doesn't cost the earth (sigh) ....

Sort by View Count removed - Why I'm using YouTube less

I thought I'd share a frustration that I have with YouTube.

Once apon a time, YouTube allowed you to sort videos by relevance, date and view count.

For some reason, that I can't explain, in a recent site tweak they removed the ability to sort by viewcount and now you can only sort by relevance and date - which is annoying.

This is one of the ways I'd tell which videos are the most popular and therefore worth watching.

I guess they are trying to steer people towards viewing channels, categories and regions, which means that they can use this to upsell to premium channels in future. In any case, because of this feature, I don't find YouTube as useful anymore and find that I am using it less.

But if anyone can explain the rationale behind this minor change it would be much appreciated.

Freemind vs Mindmanager

I've long been a fan of mindmapping for work and just general idea management. I am a big fan of Mindjet's Mindmanager software having found it very handy when preparing proposals, particularly heirarchical representations of website information architecture. However I have also found also found it to be very expensive. So after evaluating several different versions, installing and uninstalling them, I recently experimented with a piece of software called Freemind. Before this, I hadn't been able to find anything quite like Mindjet's offering.

Freemind does most of what Mindmanager does, the main difference being that it is free and runs just as well on any platform and the XML support is much better for integration with websites. While the interface isn't as slick as Mindmanager (certain things like linking nodes, icons and notes can be tricky at first), Freemind still holds its own.
I'm interested to see what other people use and if there is anything better out there or if people really feel that Mindmanager is worth the money they are paying for it.