Showing more than one note concurrently is not enough

Posted by 22111
Nov 1, 2013 at 09:44 PM

You just have to look at the number of posts in this thread, and you easily see that this double-pane feature is one of the most important for many people; given that, AND considering that coding it is easy, it’s all the less understandable that most developers do NOT introduce it (or in such a ridiculous way as in MyInfo: as said, read-only (and awful pop-up) for several years now).

Of interest here, another consideration: That feature is not only of utmost importance in a “writing workflow”, but it is of even greater importance for CRM. Let’s have a phone call, from your customer/prospect, or from yourself, to him. Now you will have a “main item” for him, in your outliner, and then several sub-items, in chronologic order, for any “contact” you had with him, purchase, phone call, call. Of course, you could have these within fields on the main page for this customer, but the basic problem would remain the same:

For one, you write down some new info here, but for best playing role (both for your business and for the customer!), you need to refer to other info that is already there, be it a big field with scrolling, or be it “sub-items”: In either case, you must BROWSE various info with regards to your customer… and then, even general product info (goods, services, no matter), which means you must also browse somewhere else, and at the same time, you should have your core info before your eyes, and your “write field”, for this new contact.

This means that the software on your screen should take whole advantage of today’s large screens, and should allow for several navigation “threads” concurrently, in different panes, and of course it would be a good idea to allow for browsing different info as easily as possible, within these different panes, like in a pic viewer where it is the traditional way of doing things in the way “space or right arrow will go to the next item, within the same subfolder”, and then, some say “it’s the end”, and some others let you have an option to begin browsing from start again, by just doing the “next pic” command).

In such a way, such software should be able to have limited navigation panes and commands for each of its not 2 but 3 content panes, from left to right.

Pane 1 should contain basic info for the customer, and a text field for your current writing; the contents of which could then, when you leave this main item, automatically be written into a new “contact form”, i.e. another sub-item for this customer, within the “contacts” range if there are several, or as a “contact” if there is only one “timeline” = chronology but there are several different forms, for contacts, invoices, incoming mail from him, and so, all color-coded e.g.

In pane 2, you would browse all “child items” of the item displayed in pane 1, and since some good customers could have 50 or more such sub-items, it would be a very good idea to have another tree pane, here, too, for that 1- or perhaps 2-level tree for those “siblings” or such, and, as implied above, some key commands for “next” and “previous” here, and perhaps a special “lastviewed” = lastviewed in this pane 2.

Since you won’t write in any of these items, in pane 2, pane 2 should NOT gain focus, so that you can continue to write in the “current-text” field in pane 1; the commands acting on pane 2 should all be triggerable from pane 1 (so you need different commands for navigation in pane 1, 2 and 3, but that’s only a problem for your keyboard (see the other thread with regards to today’s keyboards), not for the software. Pane 2 will then be the “contact history”, with mails, notes and all relevant documents, and it will be automatically loaded with the relevant items whenever such a customer, etc. in pane 1 is displayed.

Then, you’ll have a pane 3, for other reference material that is not directly connected to your customer in pane 1, and that thus will not be filled up automatically, but here you will choose any other content that you will need, e.g. product info of all kinds, or even info on your competition, etc. It goes without saying that in panes 1 and 2, there should be functionality for triggering relevant info for pane 3 whenever you have some “search term” highlighted there, i.e. if there is a product name on an invoice in pane 2, a command should bring up relevant info on this product in pane 3.

So the filling up of pane 3 would be by 3 different methods: By such direct triggering, by searching (here, a search results table would appear in pane 3 first, then there would be a toggle to switch forth and back between these search results, and the item in question; also, there could be some navigation commands here for displaying other results from that table, without having to display it and to click on it each time), and of course a tree navigation pane from where you will display any item that you might be in need of. So in the end, it would be best to toggle the tree and a search results in one navigation pane for content pane 3, and not toggle search results and content in that pane which should be content-only.

I am aware you would need a large screen for this (if you don’t cut it up into 2 or even 3 screens), but such a system, technically easy (!!!), would finally bring real crm functionality to such pim’s.

And yes, there should be some “storage” for such a setting, so that you will be able to switch forth and back between your previous customer (where you will have work to do, complete some notes, trigger some action from somebody (which might be yourself), e.g. work on an offer, etc. - and this customer phoning to you immediately after, and where you will have to react, too, so there should be a “history” function from which you can display not only the respective main items of these last days, etc., but together with their respective “environments” you had “open” when you were actively working on them (had the respective customer on the phone, etc.). This functionality, too, is easy, from the coding point of view.

My current crm system is abysmal, and if I judge the current situation correctly, even dedicated crm software mostly isn’t that much better, but there is no real sense in switching from one PIM to the other, because all of them are really bad in correctly organizing your business.

That’s why, e.g., yesterday on bits, I did NOT buy “Brilliant Database”, and my thinking about it was triggered by somebody on bits who, just days ago, asked for Ultra Recall there if it was right to assume UR is a DMS, too. Well, the developer answered affirmatively - I will not comment on such hybris here, but it’s evident all current PIMs lack a lot of functionality that would make your workflow much more natural than it can be, with current software, today.

And yes, ultimatively, access rights management would also be to be included within the set of new features. And dialling, caller identification, and so on, the usual goodies.