This week we had an extensive demo of Harbor CRM for "Sigma Portfolio Management and Real Estate Consultant LLC" , our parent company for real estate. This is one of Hungary's biggest real estate management firm working in multiple areas in portfolio management. Our task is to develop HarborCRM to suit their needs for managing CRM functions of Sigma.

So far, the initial reactions have been very positive: Sigma will find great opportunity to organize its leads, contacts but not only that, the deals will be their main focus to make use and report progress to the management.

There are some remarks in its current form that we will need to address in a near-future update. We are currently narrowing down the areas for future updates.

Some heavy weeks of internal testing and running a closed beta, we are now ready to jump start our public beta service. With the public beta, anyone can register for our service from now on and give it a go.

It's possible now to subscribe to any of the plans, use our sign-up page to do so. The data you upload will not be truncated in the future, so feel free to start the usual work for free. We are going towards our public release date as we are finalizing the service.

In the mean time we had to put the dreaded "beta" badge on top of this post, but let me assure you, we hate the term as much as you do.

If you have comments or questions, fire away in the comments.

Today we rolled out our public website. Not only do we have a blog, but a complete website with additional features: overview (home) page, learn more page, help & support page and sign-up page, see at the top of every screen. Until we are in closed beta, the sign-up page is not functioning.

Today we finished inviting all the closed beta participants to the system. We are keeping track of the requests in a Google Group and fixed a couple of bugs our testers have reported. Please keep us posted, because the closed beta is a very fortunate place where you get the chance to shape the product. We try to address every message posted.

After much bug hunting and last minute issue sorting today we sent out our first batch of invites to the closed beta participants. The rest of it will receive the invites in the coming days or maybe even tomorrow. We're doing a tiered invite, this is to sort out problems that may come to light.

(Seemed like a good idea.)

Most software projects born from the itching need to overcome a problem.

As a merchant company doing business for some long years now we have been itching, very much. Some of our business processes involves managing sales teams and selling services. We have been doing this for years and weren't satisfied with how we used it. Stock Excel was (and for many, is) the de-facto standard for managing and keeping track of sales activities.

Let's take a sales manager at an online news publishing company who deals with business contacts to generate revenue for the company. The news publishers contacts are people who decide on ad budgets, several deals are happening at once, the manager needs to work on those contacts and hit them with special deals, campaigns and so forth.

This is nothing out of ordinary, but where does he keep track of what he has done? If this manager is only doing business development, where does he write up his reports? Besides, what is up with his projects? How is he held accountable for his work?

He would use an Excel sheet for doing this. Later Google Docs. Or, at a large company, some feature-loaded, expensive service. For us, it was good. But, as you might have guessed by now, it was itching, and therefore we decided to make a service around this for ourselves that we can use and be happy with it.

So here we are, building a service, and we are going public beta soon.

If you are interested drop us your email address at the bottom of this page.