While there are many companies offerring Online Contact Management solutions, Fast has tried to search through them and find the best. There are two basic catagories to these solutions. Free and those with a monthly fee.

The free solutions tested were Google Apps and Zoho CRM. Both offer basic data fields, shared calendars and shared document storage. They are a great solution for a small business that really only needs to SHARE information.

The solutions which charge a monthly fee offer some distict differences from the their free counterparts. First, they offer much more customization to the fields of information that they store allowing them to become much more specific to a perticular need. Second, and most importantly, they offer a “history” of items completed with a specific contact. This is crucial when multiple people are dealing wit the same contact. This will show when an email or letter was sent or when a meeting was held and what took place. This is critical information as a business gets larger and busier.

Some of the other benefits to the monthy plans are the additional software they provide. An example offers ACT Online, Word and Outlook. The local cost to have this software is over $750 per user while he online fee is $30/month with a $50 set-up fee.

As you decide which system is right for you, these are just some of the issues to keep in mind.