I recently wrote about my transitioning to a new bug tracking system for Second Gear. In that post I discussed the prospect of using Bento:
I was incredibly interested in Bento for a tracking solution, because of those reasons. Bento is an application that I have wanted to use for quite a while, but never really found a use for it in my daily workflow. I opted against using it because it was somewhat limiting should I ever (god forbid) have to jump back into client development full-time. I need to be able to share my bug queues with clients, and that’s not exactly feasible with Bento.
Even though Bento didn’t work out for issue tracking, I have adopted it to manage my PR list. I’ve never really kept track of my correspondence with various members of the Mac media, because I couldn’t find a solution that worked well for me. I tried 37Signal’s Highrise initially, but passed on it because it seemed like too much tool for too much money when all I really need is a pumped up AddressBook.app.
My goal with PR tracking is to have a database of the people I correspond with, their contact info, a few notes about previous things we’ve worked on together and a listing of URLs emails.
For that, Bento fit the bill great. I created a fairly basic database that let’s me keep track of all this information. You can see the fruits of my labor below:
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](http://carpeaqua.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/bento1.jpg” alt=”bento1.jpg” class=”right)
What is great about Bento versus just setting up something on my own using PHP/MySQL, Core Data, FileMaker or a variety of other solutions, but Bento was the one that had the least amount of friction. Now whenever a member of the media emails me, I can search my database for their contact info and create a new record as necessary.
While the database is in its early stages, I am already seeing the benefits when I am contacting Web sites to ask them to review or write about Today. I added a boolean field so I can quickly see whether a user has reviewed Today. I now have a Smart Collection of media sites that have and have not posted a review on their site.
Bento isn’t the perfect solution for what I envision my no frills CRM to be, but it’s the closet I can get without opening up Xcode and creating the management tool of my dreams.
