Late last week Marketcircle announced a significant (and free) update to their flagship product, Daylite. This update has Foojee particularly excited, so I wanted to take a second to share what it means to us. First, some background on our involvement with Daylite. Part of what we do is help our clients implement various Apple-related business solutions, many of which include some type of CRM software (Customer Resource Management). There are several CRMs out there; some are SaaS (cloud-based), and others run natively on the Mac.

Some of my favorite SaaS prodcuts are Highrise and Basecamp from 37signals.com. However, there are two factors that often have us recommending Daylite instead. The first is cost. Daylite's licensing is far less expensive because the licenses don't expire, unlike cloud-based services where a monthly fee is involved. The second reason we recommend Daylite is the fact that it can be used while having no access to the Internet. Daylite uses an offline mode that allows you to see and edit the entire database of projects, organizations, and tasks, even when you're not online, and then sync the updates to the server when you have an Internet connection. Although this is a great feature, the offline syncing has been unreliable at times.

Without going into great detail, the syncing process didn’t happen automatically, and it interrupted your workflow for about 5 to 30 seconds each time you wanted updates from the server. Additionally, we came across quirks where we would have to sync multiple times for changes to reflect on our server. Very irritating.

With version 3.10, Daylite uses their "4th generation offline sync technology" which does two things:

  1. No more manual syncing, woohoo! Daylite now syncs automatically every 5 minutes which will completely solve the problem of our team members forgetting to sync.

  2. Syncing occurs in the background without any interaction by the user. In the past, Daylite would hinder you from using the application during the 5-30 second sync. This is a huge UI improvement and mimics the way MobileMe syncs information in the background.No more interruptions with Daylite 3.10

Overall, it seems they've improved the reliability of syncing, and I think it'll be the right CRM solution for a variety of small businesses using the Mac.

For more information about the update, and a list of recommendations before performing the update see here. Have questions? Leave them in the comments so our other readers can benefit too!