In my never-ending relentless search - no, make that crusade - for a sufficient content management system for our company, I have dealt with maybe fifteen different people from ten different companies. This, on top of all the other standard contacts I have (ISP relations, software and hardware companies, etc) means that I do a fair amount of correspondence over the phone.

Unfortunately, my confusion got the best of me a few weeks ago when I sent an email thanking a company for their product demonstration. See, two of the CMS’s I am looking at are called Sitecore and Site Executive. After the seventh or eight CMS, they all looked the same anyway, so having two with such similar names didn’t make things much better. Anyway, I ended up sending the thank you to the wrong company, which was embarrassing to say the least. If anything though, I’m glad I was the customer and they were the vendor, and not the other way around.

It was at this point that I decided I needed some type of way to keep track of my contacts. Thunderbird worked fine for email of course, but its address book was a little lacking, and I didn’t see any way to easily store notes about phone calls and the like. That’s when I remember a Lifehacker article about Highrise, a web 2.0 contact manager made by the same folks who make Basecamp, which I was also familiar with. Now I swear I read that the free version only allowed 25 contacts, but when I went to check it out myself, I saw that it allowed for 250 contacts - easily enough for me at this point.

The site works very well. It’s somewhat simplistic, but then again how many features do you really need to keep track of conversations. It’s quick, has a nice interface, and has helped me immensely in remember when the last time I spoke to certain people was, and what about. I can remember the details of full conversations pretty well, but it’s handy when I’m talking to a company to make a few clicks and say “I spoke to Eric about this on March 27th and he specifically told me it wouldn’t be a problem.” It’s also good for things like when I leave voicemail, just because that’s harder to remember.

Kudos to 37signals for making another solid product, and offering a usable free version of it.