I took a look at Highrise HQ following a recommendation by Winston Damarillo. It’s a web-based contact relationship manager (CRM) by 37signals, so it’s all pretty and Web 2.0-y.

Looking further, I’m surprised at how much my hand-hacked Emacs-based CRM can do:

Review a colleague's notes before calling her contact at the printer

I do this with BBDB. Not only that, but my system automatically inserts notes into any e-mail I compose to that person.

See all the follow-ups scheduled for this week

Got that with Planner

Set a reminder to write your client a thank-you note next Friday

Ditto with Planner

Keep all important emails from a customer together on one page

I suppose I could do that with mail search. There must be a better way, though…

Schedule a follow-up sales call with a lead in 30 days

Gotcha.

Review all communications with your investors

I haven’t figured out how to do this one yet. Mail folders help. Maybe I can hook up BBDB with my mail search engine…

Build a list of all the designers your company has hired in the past

Can do this with tags. In fact, I can build a list of people who are tagged with A but not B and whom I’ve talked to in the last year… =)

Enter notes from a call with a potential client

Gotcha.

Enter contact info for people you met at the conference this week

Gotcha.

Generate a list of contractors you worked with last year

Gotcha.

See all the people your company knows at The New York Times

Regexp search, easy enough.

Highrise: you can share your notes with other people. I don’t need that yet, and I don’t think I’ll need it any time soon.

Emacs: I can use it offline. That totally rocks. Also, I can do lots
of complicated batch operations, such as composing form letters that
include conditional text, randomized text, and personalized
signatures. I can add arbitrary data fields and write code to do all
sorts of things. I don’t need Firefox or a mouse.

You know, if I just figured out how to translate my setup to the Web,
I’d make a killing. ;)

I’m going to steal the idea of a pretty view, and I’m going to make it
easier to see all the tasks associated with a person instead of
relying on my daily view. I also need to make it easier to mark
something as for-followup. Hmmm… But yeah, not too bad, not too
bad…

Random Emacs symbol: gnus-server-opened – Function: Check whether a connection to GNUS-COMMAND-METHOD has been opened. – Face: Face used for displaying OPENED servers