Another interesting article that I came across.



Bantam-1Having easy ways to share information with your teammates is absolutely crucial when your office is wherever you happen to set down your laptop. Various tools have emerged that let you share a dashboard of sorts with your teammates. Many of them have the ability to share files, to provide instant updates on what you’re doing, to assign tasks to team members — but one feature that I’ve been looking for just hasn’t made it into many of the tools I’ve tried. Bantam Live has made good on that missing element: the ability to manage shared contacts.



Bantam-2Customer relationship management (CRM) software is a crucial component of Bantam Live’s dashboard, and for good reason. Whether you’re building a web site or selling a product, you never do it in a vacuum. Instead, there are a wide variety of people that must be contacted at various points. Bantam Live does far more than just keep a central file of phone numbers and email addresses, though: for every given contact, you can track their social media presence on sites like Twitter and LinkedIn. At a glance, you can see what your contacts have been up to and communicate more effectively with them.



Bantam Live takes other cues from social media, too. The first opportunity to interact that you see is a field for status updates. Those updates show up in a real-time activity stream, along with newly created and completed tasks, notes, events and updates to contacts. You can easily interact with each item that appears in the stream, accepting event invitations, commenting on status updates, and so forth.