AAUG Reviews

by Ronald Schoedel, AAUG Member

If you are drowning in a sea of to-do lists, folders, and sticky notes attached to every side of your monitor, the phone, and anywhere else they adhere, it is time to make the jump into a real project management solution. Daylite 3 is one of the absolute nicest I have seen yet. Daylite 3 takes a very complicated matter such as managing multiple projects, workflows, proposals, and customer relations, and successfully merges it all into a nice, attractive, interface that won’t scare you off like most project management applications could.

But don’t let the pretty face fool you: Daylite 3 is all business underneath the shiny surface. It has the muscle and flexibility needed to help a small business or workgroup manage their projects. Marketcircle says Daylite is designed for offices of 1 to 50 persons. Using Daylite made me wish even more that my entire office were Mac-based, because I could see this program making such a big difference in the way we track information and projects. Alas, since I am the only enlightened one in an office full of Windows PCs, I had to try out Daylite on my own, not really able to experience the joy of collaboration.

Daylite has several modules, such as Notes, Contacts, Calendars, Projects, Tasks, Opportunities, and Appointments. But it is far more than a basic personal information manager, Daylite shines in its ability to link these pieces of information to create a bird’s eye view of how your work fits together in the big picture. You can store all sorts of information to manage client relationships, such as customer preferences, client likes or dislikes, personal dates such as birthdays and anniversaries, to help you reach out better to your clients, either current or potential. Organizations allow you to easily link all persons associated with an individual firm, which is nice to keep all of the relationships straight in a multi-leveled project.

Pipelines, which you can customize with your own definitions of stages (for example, meet potential contractors; draft scope of work; issue bid request; and so forth), guide your projects through to completion, with the ability to link notes, contacts, and tasks to any step along the way. You can define these stages or milestones for each project pipeline.

Opportunities allow you to prepare estimates and prepare a game plan designed to succeed, as well as track why a given opportunity was either successful or note. Tracking this sort of information over time enables you to fine tune your business practices to better meet customer needs.

The ability to quickly link interrelated data is the key to the magic here. Tying together all your loose ends is why you need a productivity manager in the first place. While it has great power and potential, Daylite does not come with a short learning curve. You need to invest a few days of doing nothing but tinkering in order to get a good feel for the program. Fortunately, Marketcircle knows this, and they supply a sample database for you to learn on.

Import and Export functions abound. Since Daylite does not use the OS X Address Book, you will need to import your addresses, which is as easy as doing a simple vCard export from Address Book and then a vCard import into Daylite. Daylite will also easily import iCal files, ACT files, Now Up to Date files, and several other formats.

If you are comfortable using the OS X address book and calendar, then Daylite will be second nature to you. I do wish it could use iCal directly, but that is a minor problem. A Mail module is available to allow you to integrate directly with the OS X Mail application.

If you previously used a project manager such as Microsoft Entourage’s Project Manager, Daylite could take a bit of getting used to, due to its richer interface and more options.

An important part of such a program in a multiuser environment, and for a manager, is being able to see what everyone is doing at any given time, including the status of delegated tasks. Several included reports make this easy, but customizing those reports is something best left to someone with database management experience. Luckily, there is an active user community, as well as a number of third party Daylite consultants who stand ready to support users who really want to make the most of this software.

As you may be guessing, setting up Daylite will probably take some time. For me, in order to enter several projects, I had to come up with nice, easy definitions of milestones that I wanted to track, and enter all of those data. Importing contacts and calendars is easy, thankfully, and once you have a basic level of customization input, you can define your workflows and do further customization along the way, for example if you decide something needs to be tweaked. Daylite is extremely flexible and is what you make it.

For a one-person business, Daylite might seem like overkill at first. Don’t be frightened by the initial set up. Download the 30-day trial and play with the sample data, even modify it for your own use, using it as a template to set up a practice project of your own. I quickly came to enjoy working in Daylite, despite initially being a bit put off by its apparent complexity.

For a Mac-based small office, I am inclined to believe Daylite is probably the best solution for employees and managers who just want to spend their time working, instead of programming and entering data.

The thing that stuck out as a low point is that report building is complex and not tailored for the needs of a non-programmer. I’d be super impressed if Marketcircle could find a way to make report-building as easy as Apple’s Automator makes building routine workflows and small programs. Building forms was a bit easier, but not much. These areas could use some more user-friendly tools.

Daylite earns a 4-1/2 moose rating and my applause for making project management less mysterious and more accessible to average folks like me.

ADDENDUM, 5 November 2007

Since I was assigned the Daylite review, a newer version has been released, v. 3.5, as well as a new Leopard-compatible beta, v. 3.6. Because 3.5 has some significant upgrades over the version I tested (3.3), it is appropriate to offer some additional comments on the new Daylite suite.

My initial review mentioned how the learning curve of Daylite was a bit high. The new version includes more than 300 help articles accessed by the familiar purple help icon in various places throughout the Daylite interface. For a new user, this is a big deal.

iPhone support: Sadly, iPhones are not yet sold in Alaska, though a few have been spotted in the wild, presumably unlocked or using a non-local AT&T number. At any rate, whether you have a feral Alaskan iPhone or whether you intend to buy one the milli-second they arrive, know that Daylite is ready for you! Now, it is not just iPhones that are syncable with Daylite, though. Any smart phone or other device thatc an access Sync Services on Mac OS X is now syncable, thanks to the building in of Sync Services to the new Daylite. This is, obviously, a major upgrade. The syncable goodness in Daylite has been built to respect privacy, too. Only items designated as sharable are syncable by your co-users. Personal contacts remain between you, your iPhone and your Mac, but company wide customer contact info is available to your coworkers.

Unfortunately, everyone you work with is not using Daylite, so sharing information needs a method of exporting. Export from Daylite into Comma Separated Values (.csv) files and Tab Delimited files now makes getting your info out of Daylite and into an Excel-readable format a snap. Another real bonus, here.

A new feature which I could not test, being the only Mac user in my workgroup, is a system-wide trash that supports multiple users. Now, deleting a contact or appointment sends it to the trash instead of into permanent oblivion. In multiuser settings where one might risk deleting information that someone else might still want, this will be a useful feature, as another user can go in and grab out of the trash that which they want to restore to the database.

All in all, Marketcircle states that over 100 producitivity enhancements are in this major upgrade. Like a good Mac application, sometimes the updates are not all “gee, wow!” show stoppers, but instead are refinements to existing features that make them even better.

All of this considered, Daylite itself is a “gee, wow!” great program, and the new 3.5 and 3.6 Leopard Beta are a worthy way to manage customer data and relationships in a Mac-centric business. I’ve yet to see a nicer system.