Wish list for Relenta CRM

At Lokad, we have using the Relenta CRM for nearly two years. It’s an excellent lean CRM that comes with a core focus on emails which happen to represent about 90% of our interactions with clients and prospects.If you happen to be an ISV, Relenta is worth having a closer look.

Although, I have been missing a few key features in Relenta for a long time. Hence, I taking the time here to post my wish list for Relenta.

1. Accounts

Relenta only deals with Contacts yet, when prospecting larger companies, many contacts are typically involved. It would be much nicer if it was possible to create 1-to-many relationships between Accounts and Contacts. In particular, this would let the Relenta user browse at a glance all the latest interactions related to a particular account, instead of jumping from one contact to the next.

2. Recent updates

One of the feature that I like the most in wikis are their abilities to display the recent changes. Through recent change, you can gain immediate insights in what other people are doing, without having to bother to actually ask them.

Presently, there is no way to easily figure out who has been doing what in Relenta.  It would much nicer if a stream of recent updates was available for browsing. In particular, display could be made more or less compact by aggregating updates per contact (or per account). Eventually, the stream could even be made available as RSS.

3. Activity capture API

The Lead Capture API of Relenta is a killer feature due to its simplicity. For an ISV, it’s a super simple way to collect all trial registrations that keeps flowing through our online apps with extremely limited integration grunt-work.

Yet, although it’s very simple to automate the Contact creation in Relenta, it’s not possible to automate the insertion of Activities later on the very same contact. This feature would be extremely handy to automatically report payments, or any kind of noticable activities (in the case of Lokad that would be large forecasts retrieval for example).

4. Refined tagging

Tagging is one of the best idea of the Web 2.0 wave. It’s a great way to organize complex yet little structured content.

Relenta already provide a minimal tagging system, yet there is no tag auto-completion (killer feature) and it’s not possible to search against multiple tags. Pushing a bit more work on tags would be a great move forward to make the most of them.

5. iCalendar support

iCalendar is a very nice and popular format to send meeting request. Presently, Relenta does not support .ics attachments and meeting requests appears as completely garbled. It would be really nice if Relenta was support iCalendar with the possibility to acknowledge meeting requests.


Reader Comments (1)

Thank you, Joannes! If we could, we’d add all of these features tomorrow. The good news is that we should be able to complete these before year’s end. July 29, 2010 | Dmitri Eroshenko