One of the most common questions I get asked about YourPCM is whether more than one person can login to it. My answer is always, "yes of course, as many as you like, but you need to be careful". Be careful about what exactly? Be careful about not overwriting important notes by accident ...
Using YourPCM with a small team means record locking is a must!
Here's a simple real-world scenario. You're on the phone with a contact and happily making notes about the conversation. You come off the phone, get slightly distracted and don't bother to update the record while you do something else. If it's just you, then no problem, the notes get updated later on and all is well.
"But what if you have a small team?"
Moments later, your contact realises they forgot something and calls back. Someone else in your team answers the phone, opening up the notes section for that contact and starts jotting down the conversation. Then you remember you didn't update the notes from your 30-minute conversation and you hit update and go off and do something else.
After your team member finishes their conversation, they hit update too. But because you hadn't updated your notes sooner, the contact's record that your team member saw wasn't showing the notes you took earlier. And now your notes are gone because they were overwritten by the notes your team member took.
"Oh dear. That's not good is it?"
When I launched YourPCM (back then it was the SLO Personal Contact Manager), I was only working with self-employed people, or single-person limited companies, so record locking wasn't really a problem. Now, YourPCM is being used not only by solo entrepreneurs, but by small teams as well, and the old chestnut of, "they who update last gets the update" just doesn't cut it anymore.
After talking to some of our subscribers, and a whole pile of furious late-night coding, we now have proper record locking in YourPCM. This is done by adding your team's names to the MY TEAM popup dialog box. The next time they log in, it asks them to identify themselves.
If one logged-in person opens the notes section for a contact then it will lock it so no one else can access it until the original person closes the notes section and it gets unlocked again. The down arrow used to access the notes section, is greyed out.
"It's a very simple solution to what is a very important problem!"
Now, our subscribers can add up to 15 other team members (they're always number one) and they are identified for as long as they're logged in and record locking is in play. There is a caveat here that we're going to be charging for extra users.
As I said earlier, you can add another 15 users and they cost £4.99 each. Just email us to tell us how many you want and we'll get them added and adjust your monthly subscription accordingly. This also means you can adjust it downwards should a team member leave.
"A subscription for YourPCM comes with a license for just one person to log in at a time!"
With the powerful addition of contact record locking, you can be sure that the scenario I mentioned above won't happen again. Remember, we only work with UK small business owners, so we think a maximum of 16 team members is the right number for now.
Let us know if you want to add more users to your copy of YourPCM to ensure you're properly licensed.
Love, light and logic ...
STEFFI LEWIS
The CRM designed exclusively for UK small business owners ...
Developer, blogger, photographer, videographer, foodie, sci-fi nut, cat lover, brain aneurysm & cancer survivor, countryside dweller, and networker.
Published my first website in 1993 for the Open University and am highly experienced with Windows Servers, SQL Server, HTML, Classic ASP, JavaScript, and CSS.
I've also worked as a professional photographer in Los Angeles, USA and been a vision mixer and channel producer for live television in my time.
I live in a village north of Milton Keynes with my two cats, Baggins and Gimley, and a large planted aquarium full of unruly tropical fish.
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