Maximizer 8

Contact manager Maximizer 8 tracks customer interest in your product, from first contact through payment and beyond, by borrowing several useful high-end customer relationship management (CRM) tools found in Maximizer's enterprise-level application, Maximizer Enterprise. Maximizer 8 also improves its ease of use and replaces its clunky former report organiser with the much more versatile Crystal Reports. For most small businesses, Sage's ACT! Professional will be easier to use. However, the similarly priced Maximizer 8 could be a better choice if you're looking to grow your business and you think you may need to track sales in greater depth with a more CRM-oriented contact manager.

Installation & interface
Despite its many features, Maximizer's installation and use are relatively easy. In the UK, Maximizer Software sells the product through a network of business partners, among them Avrion. Installation is pain-free, ultimately requiring about 300MB of hard disk space. The Maximizer interface is easy to comprehend. The major sections are: My Work Day, listing your current tasks and appointments; Calendar for scheduling tasks, including printing to paper Franklin Planners and DayRunner organiser formats; Address Book for maintaining contacts; Hotlist for targeting your best prospects; Email for accessing Outlook; Company Library for closing a sale with the latest presentation and market info; Personal; and OrderDesk for invoicing sales. These are all listed along with their icons on the left and include multiple means of access, via a menu option, a button bar option or a right-click.

Features
Maximizer 8 provides numerous improvements over previous releases, including its ability to export Maximizer Address Book entries directly into Outlook. But Maximizer 8 surpasses ACT! with its native ability to track and close sales in greater depth. For example, Maximizer might aid a sales employee for a clothing manufacturer who needs day-to-day involvement with customers. Within Maximizer's Opportunities screen, that salesperson could tag each new lead with a sales prospect ('doubtful', 'very good' and so on). Maximizer's Company Library feature keeps handy documents that will help make the sale, including price lists and images to attach to a Web site or a brochure. The Maximizer OrderDesk then finishes the sale, letting the salesperson fill out an order form or an inquiry -- complete with address, item codes and comments -- for electronic forwarding to the appropriate departments, including the merchandise warehouse. The daily, weekly and monthly calendar views in Maximizer 8 have also been revised to hold more information drawn from other modules in the contact manager so that tasks, appointments and even conference room scheduling is possible. There's also an accounting add-on for Intuit's QuickBooks that allows users of both applications to view vendor and customer info. Transactions in Maximizer 8 automatically sync with the appropriate QuickBooks data file, allowing a salesperson, for example, to electronically send an order to a number of appropriate departments -- including accounting, sales and inventory -- at the same time. Maximizer 8's most significant change, however, is its replacement of ReportSmith, from Strategic Reporting Systems, with the superior and more versatile Crystal Reports from Business Objects. For example, an estate agent could use Crystal Reports to generate comparative pie charts detailing the resale value of homes in different local areas for his or her customers, or a sales manager could turn out graphs comparing wholesale product movement by national region and time of year.

Service & support
Telephone support -- following registration -- is available from Maximizer Software Monday to Friday, between 9am and 5pm. You have to call a premium rate number, which costs £1 per minute. Maximizer Software's business partners will also provide technical support. The context-sensitive in-program help system is effective, with entries for everything from the most generic (Address Book) to the specific (Print Column Report). Maximizer also provides a excellent online searchable knowledge base, although it does not offer email support. There is a printed 32-entry tutorial database and a printed and indexed 200-plus-page user guide, too.