Daylite 3.7.4 Adds iWork 08, Dialectic Integration

by , 1:00 PM EDT, July 8th, 2008

Marketcircle, Inc. has announced the immediate availability of Daylite version 3.7.4 with iWork '08 and Dialectic telephony integration. Daylite is Marketcircle's flagship customer contact and task management system, written in Cocoa and is well integrated into Mac OS X technologies.

Because the latest of version of Daylite has added the ability to generate customized content using Apple's Pages, Numbers and Keynote, TMO contacted Marketcircle to find out more. We spoke with Alykhan Jetha, the CEO of Marketcircle who explained that this is indeed a significant update, despite the innocent looking change from version 3.7.3 to 3.7.4. One reason for that is that Marketcircle has even bigger plans for version 3.8.

A Customer Shift

Mr. Jetha, who goes by "AJ," told TMO that they have seen a skyrocketing demand for integration with iWork '08 thanks to its new features. Historically, Daylite supported Excel and Word, but not PowerPoint. Word was used for correspondence and Excel for custom client spreadsheets. However, when Office 2008 for the Mac arrived, customers started requesting Pages, Numbers and Keynote integration in addition.

"The new features of Pages turned the tide," Mr. Jetha said. However, the challenge was finding a way to actually do the integration since the APIs are not surfaced. Marketcircle ended up doing the integration at the file and XML level.

For example, merge tokens can now be embedded in Pages documents. When a customer record is pulled up from the database, a custom correspondence document can be printed out. {See image below.]

Can You Call Me Now?

Daylite 3.7.4 also includes a connector to Dialectic, the leading telephony solution on the Mac. Dialectic supports both outbound and inbound calls using mobile phones, landlines and VoIP systems, for example, Asterisk, Vonage, Skype, Cisco IP phones, Phlink, and PhoneValet. Users can easily call out from Daylite using any of supported dialing methods.

Daylite can also be specified as a Dialectic contact source for quick and easy lookups and, best of all, for incoming caller identification. For example, when Dialectic recognizes the incoming number, the corresponding database record for that contact is brought up on the screen.

Other New Features

Of course, the iWork '08 and Dialectic features are the only new things in version 3.7.4. Additions include a Concepts Guide," improved importing of calendar data without time zone tags and a significantly improved offline synchronization reliability.

As a result, Daylite becomes an even more integrated customer contact system. Tasks can be assigned to team members, projects tracked, sales opportunities identified and followed up. Custom spreadsheet and correspondence can be created and there's that handy telephone linkage with Dialectic.

What's Next?

Mr. Jetha was excited to talk about the next stage of integration with the iPhone. "It's called Daylite Touch, a play on the Cocoa Touch code we use," he said. "With the Daylite Touch server, users will be able to control just what information gets displayed on the iPhone. That's because the bandwidth to the iPhone is still limited and there's limited screen real estate."

Marketcircle is calling it: "Your business in your pocket," and it's scheduled to be released with Daylite 3.8.

For now, Daylite 3.7.4 is a free upgrade for Daylite 3.x customers and is strongly recommended. Daylite comes with a 30 day free trial, has a low cost trial period extension for $19, has an integration plug-in with Apple Mail and starts at US$189.00 for a single user.