Marketcircle’s newest version of Daylite, their Mac CRM and project management program, brings a fresh perspective on production and efficiency. Daylite 6 centralizes all business activities into one hub, allowing various business units and their individual team members to collaborate and function with real-time accountability. However, set apart from former versions and other CRM/project management products, Daylite 6 features a new Team View, which, I believe can transform not only workflow and productivity, but also the overall attitude and thinking of how businesses operate.

What’s inside?

Team View is by far the most valuable added feature to Daylite 6. In today’s world of virtual offices, remote professionals, and various business units communicating across timezones and continents, Daylite’s Team View gives team collaborators and managers a bird’s eye view of workload, appointments (and their duration), tasks, project due dates, and sales opportunity due dates. From Team View, you can send emails and schedule meetings with one, some, or all members of a team. In addition, you can navigate among different teams to check on their workload, identify any scheduling conflicts or delays, and monitor appointments and reporting activities.

Mobility

Let’s face it. A business solution is only as good as its ability to tag along wherever business is being conducted. As a Mac-based business solution, Daylite can go mobile with Mac, iPhone, and iPad integration of contacts, calendar, notifications, and even Siri. I was pleased to discover that I could access my data offline as well. Speed, user-interface, and multitasking among Apple devices was virtually seamless—another feature essential to efficiency and productivity built into the product.

Adding Contacts

The seamless interface with Apple contacts makes adding contacts into Daylite only a few clicks away. Of course, I went to Marketcircle’s website to get the step-by-step process. Without complication or question, I was able to do as they instructed. I chose to select multiple contacts by holding down the Command key, then clicking each contact I wanted to add, easily added my existing business-related contacts into Daylite.

Depending on how your contacts are set up in Apple Contacts, you can also select multiple items listed together by clicking the first contact, then pressing the Shift key and clicking the last one or selecting Command-A to select all contacts.

Once I set-up my initial group of contacts (e.g., ones already assigned to a team), I proceeded to create new contacts within the Daylite interface. Again, Marketcircle’s instructions proved reliable. Filling in the details of my newly entered contacts, I was pleasantly surprised with the additional fields that gave me more detailed classifications. Categories like lead, customer, employee, and vendor make it simple to see upfront the unique type of contact you’re dealing with.

Keywords, which can be applied without limit, help you further identify a contact. This is particularly useful when used consistently across contacts, capturing information like lead temperature or trade show attendances (examples listed on Marketcircle.com). The “Roles & Relationships” field enables contacts to be linked with other contacts and/or companies by projects, opportunities, and role. The website lists examples of roles as sales manager, business owner, or agent. Examples of relationships include “spouse of,” “referred by/of,” and “business partner of.” While I had not anticipated these additional contacts classifications, I was excited to apply them into all of my contacts.

Rethinking management

What struck me as most important and revolutionary about Daylite was how it can change a company’s entire approach to doing business. The Team View, in my opinion, visually represents how time, projects, and communication pulls a thread of community through a tech-driven small business world. Coworkers are no longer packed together in cubicles or small office spaces, sharing weekend stories in the coffee room. Still, “seeing” one another remains an important factor in working effectively and well together. Daylite brings community into a mobile and remote environment while encouraging productivity across business units and tasks. When community is achieved in a business, then teamwork happens organically.

With Daylite, in particular the added Team View feature, the “eye” in teamwork is a bird’s eye view of an efficient business machine working together in common purpose for collaborative outcomes. I recommend small businesses to bring employees, clients, and projects together using Daylite 6.