Do.com is stepping further into the “productivity platform” territory, which is a natural step for the users who depend on it to help manage project tasks. It will be adding new features to help you manage your project contacts and sales cycle.
Contacts
While Do.com has always been a simple and flexible task management solution (especially for small project teams), what happens as that team grows? Alternatively, what if there is a one-off project that requires input and task assignments to people outside the team? I’ve been a proponent of Do.com (and tools like it) from the start for keeping remote writers and other project workers in sync with remote clients and partners. In my mind, using it just as much for task management as they would for communications so contact management wouldn’t be such a big thing as the product existed previously. However, that was only going to scale so much. Do.com is now adding a Contacts feature which enables you to pull in contacts from Gmail, Facebook, and *.csv files into Do.com groups. While I welcome the Contacts feature joining the Do.com platform, I would like to see LinkedIn integration as part of it as well. While Gmail, Twitter, and Facebook do play a part in how many organizations (especially volunteer) communicate and collaborate, there are plenty of us out there who separate our business and personal lives online — or work with people who don’t use social media tools.
Deals
Do.com is also making the daring leap into some light Customer Relationship Management (CRM) features with this latest release. The new Do.com Deals feature promises a view into the entire sales pipeline, offering you a view into how deals are progressing towards a close and a complete overview of how your business is progressing. Even solo freelancers could benefit from a better view into their sales cycle. And while there are a great number of fine cloud-based CRM apps, the Do.com Deals feature could be a great entry level solution for this task. When smaller shops are struggling to put some processes into place around their sales cycle, there can be a delicate balance of budget, support, and sometimes an implied (or passive) reluctance to put such business controls in place. The new Deals feature coming to Do.com can be a user-friendly solution to put in place without resorting to a CRM app that might be too complex to support.
Do.com Goes Freemium
Since the beginning, Salesforce has made Do.com a free service — even from the initial preview. I couldn’t help seeing the makings of Do.com as a gateway drug into fee-based Do.com services and upgrade paths to other Salesforce offerings. Well, that is starting in earnest with this release as both Contacts and Deals are offered under “freemium” pricing. Freemium pricing will kick in depending on the amount an organization uses the new features. (Note: At the time of this writing, Salesforce hasn’t released much information on the usage threshold and the pricing tiers.)
From Task Management to Productivity Platform
The latest updates to Do.com makes the platform an even better entry level or lightweight solution for freelancers and project teams seeking better tools to manage project tasks and processes without the burden of heavy learning curves or application overhead. How are you using Do.com? Share your experience in the comments.
