Daylite 3
Marketcircle Inc.
Price: $149 (free trial; volume pricing available; Mail integration extra)
Pros: Complete project, resource, and client management solution; networked by nature; good integration with common apps; nearly unlimited flexibility.
Cons: No support for team members without Daylite, complicated interface for advanced features, expensive.
by Gerrit Dalman, 1st Lt, USAF
Everyone knows the Mac has a lot more to contribute to productivity than word processing and spread sheets, but many organizations and businesses still don't use computers to manage their resources. Marketcircle's Daylite 3 is a Mac-only project management app that can do just that.
Aimed squarely at small businesses and organizations (Marketcircle recommends up to 50 users), Daylite prodives all the tools you could want to keep groups efficient and on-task. With it, team members can coordinate private and shared contacts, calendars, and projects.
It doesn't help you create any products. It helps you manage resources. What it does - and does well - is track people, time, projects, and material assets.
With a healthy amount of setup and maintenance, individual users will be empowered to easily manage more robust calendars and contacts than either Apple or Microsoft's products support. They can also manage notes, tasks, and much more. Perhaps most important, all of this information is shared with all users.
While you can use Daylite on a single computer, it's networked nature means you can access multiple databases from a local network or across the internet and if you're on the road, you can even take an offline copy of the database with you - very helpful for on-the-go managers!
The interface is intimidating yet everything you would expect from a Mac application. It offers quick access to all the data Daylite can store and index and basic functionality is simple enough. More advanced functions and customization can be less intuitive, though. Fortunately there is a complete sample database to give you some perspective and thorough online documentation of all features.
Thanks to that sophistication there are a lot of ways to view your data. You can can take a people-centric approach or focus on calendars, but my favorite method is project oriented. The project view summarizes endeavors with a visual timeline featuring user-defined phases along side links to all assigned staff, related contacts, component tasks, upcoming deadlines, related meeting notes, and anything else you deem relavent.
That ability to create "links" - unlimited abstract relationships - between data of all types is key to Daylite's impressive flexibility. You can link tasks to projects, contacts to calendar items, resources to meetings, and and so on.
What's more, you can actually issue instructions to team members by a similar method. Delegating just about anything - tasks, meetings, or entire projects - can be as easy a click!
On it's own, Daylite is already a client management system, a productivity suite, and team tracker all in one, but it can be even more when integrated with other tools you're familiar with. Most important is an optional module that supplies Daylite functionality in Mail. It takes up a lot of screen realestate and requires both programs to be running, but it allows you to see context-sensitive Daylite data directly in Mail and to perform functions based on incoming messages.
Less productive, but still welcome, are iPod sync, Mac OS X services for making new tasks, appointments, contacts, and notes in any application, and import/export support for iCal and Address Book. Oddly though, I actually like that I can keep my numerous business contacts separate from my more personal Address Book collection.
What really makes Daylite shine above competition like Entourage is flexibility and networking. Every aspect of the database can be tailored to the needs and culture of your organization and it's fully integrated suite of customer and resource management tools are meant to leverage the collaboration of multiple users.
The only sticking point is the price. It's too expensive for most individual users and a little steep even for groups. Especially since you have to pay extra for email integration.
Still, there's no doubt that Daylite can do much more than Entourage or Apple's default apps. Busy individuals looking to get organized should give it a try and Mac-using leaders in small businesses and organizations shouldn't pass it up without a thorough trial.
System Requirements:
* Mac OS X 10.3.9
* 1GHz G4 or better
* 512MB of RAM
* 250MB hard disk