[Chuckit]

I'm looking for opinions on the best way to go about this. My work needs a more powerful contact- and time-management system. Basically, it needs to be able to associate contacts and events together with e-mails and files, and needs to be able to remind salespeople of upcoming meetings and do mail merges with contacts based on what events are happening.

I'm decent with database programming (from doing Web sites backed with MySQL), but I've already got several other coding projects going on and don't really need more stuff dumped on my plate. So my first thought was FileMaker. But after downloading the demo and playing around a little bit, it doesn't look like FileMaker would be that much easier than rolling my own Cocoa interface to a database, and getting FileMaker to interact with other parts of the system (e.g., e-mail) seems like it will actually be a lot more work.

So, any ideas on the best approach? Or even just anybody with more FileMaker experience than I have who'd like to share their perspective?

[Ludovic Hirlimann]

Originally Posted by Chuckit

I'm looking for opinions on the best way to go about this. My work needs a more powerful contact- and time-management system. Basically, it needs to be able to associate contacts and events together with e-mails and files, and needs to be able to remind salespeople of upcoming meetings and do mail merges with contacts based on what events are happening.

You might want to take a look at something like phpgroupware (I think it's hosted on sf.net), or any other free groupware application that can be found on sourceforge.

[Sharky K.]

what about daylite? http://www.marketcircle.com/daylite/

[altimac]

You can try OD4Contact from Objective-Decision. It may not be able to manage hundreds of thousands of contact though... but link Mail messages (and phone calls, fax, chats etc...) to Contacts and Tasks is very easy and well integrated with OS X