One of the great advantages to Heap CRM is its simplicity, there are only two types of information: Messages and Events. Have an e-mail, well that’s a message. Have a task, well that’s just an event without a time. It doesn’t matter whether it was a phone message, file, appointment or really anything else, it would always fit into these categories. But there really wasn’t any connection between messages and events. Now there is.

Let’s say I need to take some notes about a meeting I had with a client. Simple enough, take them down and associate the message.

But really there are three things that I need to do relating to this message. One is an appointment, two are tasks and they are on a different calendar. No problem. Just click on the “Add a Follow-up Event.” As you can see you can have as many events as you want, you just use the “Add Another Event” button to add another event to the message.

Great, I’m ready to post.

Ok, so I can see the events here, and I can check them off here as well, but how do they look on the calendar?

You’ll notice we have new icon on this event. Just like the tiny person icon gave you way to see associations, the tiny message icon let’s you see associations to messages. As you would expect, if you click on the message icon it will take you to the message.

Apparently I’ve been living under a rock for the last couple of months (too much coding) because I missed a product that has unbelievable potential: Drobo. I apologize to anyone thinking that this is old news, but I think it’s important. For those you who were under that rock with me, Drobo is a RAID device that allows you to put in different size drives into the case and actually use the extra capacity. It also is an intelligent little box and will actually change RAID types to maximize the file storage. Now, this is of obvious use to home users who are about as likely to backup their data as I am to swim the English Channel. And as soon as they have a FireWire version video editors will be in love. But what gets me all excited is something that has not been discussed: This technology in RAID for servers.

Today in your typical server farm you have external RAID devices to store your data. This allows for larger databases and easier access for web applications. Problem is, if your web application stores a lot of data (like Heap CRM does) you are constantly needing to expand storage. So what do you do? Well you add more drives of course. So how big of drives are you going to add? Well how about 1TB drives, that’s the largest right? Well, you can’t because when bought the RAID, 100GB was the largest drive you could buy and that’s what the other drives in the RAID are. So you buy 100GB drives. At some point you will fill the RAID and you buy another.

An “enterprise” Drobo would be the last RAID any web application or file server would ever need. So, you start out with 100GB drives. Then you expand with 1TB drives. You fill it with 2TB drives and replace the 100GB drives with 4TB drives. The storage would essentially become endless.

What does this mean to end users? You would have less downtime for maintenance on your favorite web applications, massive amounts of storage would be a lot cheaper if not free and you would see more players in the marketplace as the cost of entry would drop.

Let’s say you want to follow up with a prospect in a few weeks. Send them a nice customized E-Mail. Now you could put a note on the calendar, and make sure it’s something you do when the time comes. Or you could have Heap CRM do it for you.

Start by just creating an event exactly as you would normally. But now, there is an option that says “Send an E-Mail Template.” Go ahead and click on that.

Select the E-Mail template; and that’s it, when the day you put the event on arrives the E-Mail will be sent automatically, the event will be checked off, and message will be placed in your account and associated to the prospect. You can have as many of these events as you want with as many templates as you want, which means you can now do “drip E-Mail” marketing directly from Heap.

With the Heap Gadget you can search your CRM for messages, events, leads, opportunities, customers and contacts (people); as well as be informed of recent activity without ever leaving your start page or iGoogle.

Just like the Mac OS X Widget, the Heap CRM Gadget initially shows you the most recent items, but once you start searching you get access to all the data in your account.

Add the Heap CRM Gadget to Google »
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So, everyone knows any text area in Heap CRM can include images, hyperlinks, formatting and a lot more using the formating guide. But did you know that in addition to automatically identifying phone, e-mail and web addresses, Heap can recognize FedEx and UPS tracking numbers? Or, recognize usernames for AIM (AOL Instant Messenger), Yahoo! Messenger or Skype? Let’s see this in action. Below is a typical e-mail:

If you click on the tracking number it takes you to UPS’ tracking details. Clicking either the Yahoo! or AIM links will open a new chat. And, of course, clicking on the Skype link will make a call.

Often times with support requests I get asked how to forward email into Heap CRM more quickly. Well on the Mac the answer is Mail Act-On. Here is my setup:

So, when I hit my trigger key (in my case the “~”), the above menu pops up and I can hit “c” (for instance) if I want to forward it to Heap and have it automatically be placed in the category “Custom Software.” Or I can hit “s” if the e-mail is a support issue, etc.

Remember, Heap will automatically associate it to the correct lead, opportunity, customer or archive, and none of this categorization does anything to change that.

So, how does this work? Let’s take a gander at my mail rules:

Ok, Act-On works on the concept of defining a letter then a “|” followed by a description. I would recommend you use the sample entries and just duplicate them. Let’s edit the “Forward to Heap (Category:Custom Software)” rule.

Alright, you see from the perform menu, I’ve selected “Forward Message” and I’ve told it to forward to message+wbp@crmondemand.biz. Remember to substitute your Heap sub-domain where I have “wbp”. But if I just do that, the message will get into Heap and it will auto associate with the correct lead, opportunity, customer and archive; but it won’t be placed in a category. The fix: click on the “Message…” button.

Ok, as you can I placed a little note in here that will automatically prepend to the message. Again, in your case put the name of the category you want to put the message in, in place of “custom software”. Also, make sure that you create one of these rules without any message text, so you can tell Heap to do the default action: place the message in no category at all.

We’ve added a bunch of stuff to Heap recently. Let’s dive in:

Overdue Events

This is a new option on the dashboard. From here you can see events and tasks you haven’t completed. You can complete the event, go the lead, opportunity, customer or archive it’s associated to or go to the calendar and month it’s on.

Export Search Results

You can now export search results. When you are exporting leads, opportunities, customers, archives and people you can export CSVs or vCards. But where it gets really cool is when you export messages or calendar events. When you export messages, you are actually subscribing to a special RSS feed. Which means that it is effectively a live export. As the search results change (from people adding/editing messages) the RSS feed changes with it. Same deal with the iCalendar export (for events).

Complete RSS / iCal
We have lots of RSS feeds and iCalendar subscriptions available in Heap. Sometimes, you want something really fine tuned, sometimes not so much. Complete RSS allows you to subscribe to every message associated to a lead, opportunity, customer, or archive where you are one of the managing users. Effectively it allows you to subscribe to all messages that have anything to do with one of the prospects that your involved with. Complete iCal allows you subscribe to every event that is associated to a lead, opportunity, customer, or archive that you are one of the managing users. Compete RSS and iCal can be found on the bottom of your dashboard.

We have seven pre-built scripts to perform actions from QuickSilver:

1. Create an Event
2. Create a Person
3. Create a Lead
4. Create an Opportunity
5. Create a Customer
6. Create an Archive
7. Create a Message

Create an Event
Ok, so you want to create an event from QuickSilver. You could do something like this:

Of course, you could type something like “7/15/07:My Title:My Location” if you don’t want to specify a description. Or, you could type “7/15/07:My Title” if you just wanted to specify a date and title. you could even type “My Title” and the script would assume the event is on today.

Create a Person
How about a person? You could just type something like this:

But you could also type something like “Full Name - Company:Phone:Mobile”, “Full Name - Company:Phone”, or “Full Name - Company”.

Create a Lead
You can also create a lead:

Just like the person script, you can specify any number of fields from just their name clear up to the five you see in the above image. Creating opportunities, customers and archives works identically.

Create a Message

Ok, if you don’t want to specify a title, you can just type the message body.

Setup
Each script has a section near the top that looks like this:

You need to modify the black text to match your login email, password, and your sub-domain. Your sub-domain is the first group of letters before the period in your heap address. So for instance if you logged into heap at “http://creativearc.crmondemand.biz/” your sub-domain would be “creativearc”. Now you need to copy the modified scripts to “~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions”. You might have to create the “Actions” folder.

Download QuickSilver Scripts »

1. Company Drawer: Need to quickly find someone else at this company? Just click on this button. Instantly a drawer with other members of the company scrolls down
2. Show Messages: Sometimes a single person is multiple leads, opportunities, customers and archives. When this happens it use to be difficult to see all messages related to a single person because they were spread out through multiple areas. Now you can just click this button and get every message associated to the person regardless of how many leads, opportunities, customers and archives that may be spread across.
3. Export: Just like the new “show messages” feature, you can now subscribe to all messages and calendar events associated to this person regardless of how many leads, opportunities, customers and archives that may be spread across.
4. Show Messages (Related Person): Just like the main “show messages” feature, this button allows you to see all messages of leads, opportunities, customers and archives that this person is related to.

For the first time Heap CRM and the iPhone provide a way for mobile business user to use a simple CRM from anywhere. We’re so excited by the iPhone launch and we just wanted to show off a bit of the “customized for iPhone” interface.

Enjoy!