Hello to one and all.
I am a user of Maximizer 9 and have been using Maximizer since the 97 version.
The opinion I am looking for deals with email. First of all I am not a big fan of Outlook, I run my own small business and Maximizer does everything that I need with appointments, address and keeping track of my customer information and correspondance. For that matter, I also don't use MS Office for the most part either, I use OpenOffice.org as my Word Processor and Spreadsheets. One reason, other than the cost, is because there are certain features that I like better in OOo than MS Word. One of these features is how OOo handles images within a document, it's much easier I find and files that I save in the xml format are much much smaller than the .doc format in MS Word. I typically don't use the Word Processor within Maximizer only because it lacks some features that I would like to have. When I am doing up proposals I use the find feature to help me count up certain parts for pricing. MS Word does this just as well as OOo, but doesn't seem to even be in Maximizers Word Processor, sorry I know that was a bit off topic. Anyway, using Outlook for me as only an email program is simply overkill! I have been using the GFYD (Google For You Domain) under GMail for email because of the fact that I like the search capabilities of Google and the fact that I can access my email anywhere.
When I did use Outlook for email I did like the fact that you could simply right click on the contact and select email and Maximizer would do the rest. I also liked the fact that if I were to CC: to someone I could click the CC: tab and chose to search directly from Maximizer the additional contacts that I wanted to send my email to. I also liked the fact that I could choose to write the email in HTML and to automatically save a copy of the email in my documents.
What I didn't like was the fact that I wasn't always in my office and as my Maximizer Database is stored on a Server, that was a problem when I was away. The other thing that I didn't like was the fact that although Maximizer saved a copy of the email to my documents, it didn't automatically save a copy of the reply of my customer back to me. Having a copy of this reply sometimes contains critical information that you might need about your customer.
In GFYD GMail, I have gotten into a habit of copy/pasting email out of GMail and into a document within Maximizer, a few more steps than doing it right out of Maximizer, but does the job.
I guess it would be best if Maximizer contained it's own Email client within the program, that would be awesome! I like to work within the Maximizer program itself as much as possible and I would be interested in hearing from other people on how they handle email.
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