Managing a Contact database, even a good one can be a pain. This is because there are always things that need to be intergrated with your database, like email, marketing and tasks.
There are many contact management solutions out there and some are actually quite good. Webware like Highrise is great in the way it integrates your database with tasks and it even does an ok job at including email, at least to some degree. If you are looking for a complete solution however Relenta is the only Contact Management system we have found that really does everything.
Email
Relenta is different from many contact management systems in that it handles email. It is basically an email client on the web which can send and recieve from all of you various email addresses. Is also has plain text and HTML functionality as well as basic email functionality like creating signatures, incoming email filters and even auto-responders. It is not as well featured as something like Outlook or Thunderbird, but it is a competent email client which has not left us wanting as far as functionality is concerned.
Contact Database
Relenta can import and organise your contacts with the best of them, having all of the standard felids as well as tags and groups. Grouping your contacts in Relenta allows you to send emails to groups which is a very nice feature we use all the time, grouping contacts into different client categories is very handy. You can also do all of the other things you would expect like add tasks and custom fields to users as well as a good search capability as well.
Task Management
We would have liked to have seen task management have a more smooth a flow something like Highrise, but you can still do some of the basic task management functions with relative ease. One function that was missing was the ability to set recurring tasks, at the moment Relenta does not do this which we find unusual considering the way that it is orientated towards business use. Related to this it would be nice to be able to set tasks according to group creating a workflow for different groups making it so that just adding a person to a group would assign certain tasks to them. Having said this however, the tasks functionality is still quite usable and certainly functions well enough for our everyday needs.
Email Marketng
One of the ways Relenta stands out from the crowd is through its ability to do email marketing. Using the contact groups described earlier you can set up a series of emails to go out for each group at the intervals of your choosing. This integration between email, contacts and marketing is a huge time saver when compared to using something like Mailchimp with Highrise for example and has helped. our operation no end.
Conclusion
Relenta allows you to put all of the important aspects of manageing a client base into one place and does the job pretty well. We would love to see some more features and the tasks functionality needs some polishing up but we still think its the best alternative out there.
Give it a try for free here, see what you think.
Dave
Sunday, February 12, 2012 at 2:22AM 
We have just started using a new backup system for all of our desktops and servers and we love it. It's the easiest and safest system for backing up everything important that we have found and is actually easier than us using our own servers by a huge margin.
