I have been beta testing the new Etelos CRMforGoogle application. Overall, I think it’s very clever – it gives you a very lightweight CRM tool that you can easily integrate into your existing Google Personalized Homepage. If I had not already made an investment in a particular CRM solution for my own needs, I would look to this one as it’s dead simple and ought to meet most of the needs of a small organization. You can do all of the classic CRM things (add/manage contacts, track to-dos, track calls, etc). My one gripe about the service is that it ran a bit slow from my browser whenever I needed to call out to the service to read or write data.
After spending about a day using this service, I think it’s cool and I hope that other providers, namely Salesforce.com and SugarCRM, look at offering some of their core modules as things that a user could track in a personalized homepage, be it Google, NetVibes, Pageflakes, or whatever.
Also, as a user, one of the neat things that this made me realize is that being able to get a bundle of gadgets/widgets that all work really well together is very valuable — it’s a lot easier than trying to cobble together a handful of other gadgets and figuring out how/whether they can all work together.