Contact Management Software: Why Not Roll Your Own?

You may or may not know what WordPress is, but if you’ve been to this site – you’ve put your fingers on it, probably without even realizing you did.

WordPress is software to run a blog and it does that extremely well. Millions of sites are powered by WP and so is SalesTeamTools. It’s free and it has an army of developers who continuously build extensions for it.

But WordPress can do much more than powering a website like this one. And one of these things is right up our alley.

We came across an idea where WordPress is being put to test as a full-blown online contact manager.

It does require a bit of fiddling and configuring and we know that this is not for everyone so if that’s you, there are plenty of really good contact management sales tools available that work straight of the box for a small monthly fee. Many of those we reviewed in our series of contact management software applications.

But if you’re not afraid to tinker around a bit, if you’re looking for more customization options or you want to host your web based contact manager on your own servers (oh, and did I mention for free?) – take a closer look. It’s built on a very robust blogging platform and and there are a ton of additional modules (plugins) available that can make it do even more.

Think of an extensive built-in tagging system to categorize your contacts and RSS feeds. And the ability to fully customize the fields you need for your business and presenting them on nice looking contact pages, including a list of related contacts. It’s pretty good stuff if you’re familiar with WordPress and if you’re open to a bit of fiddling.

Here’s the demo site and here are the installation and configuration hints.

Would this be an option for you? Why or why not?