CRM is all about building long-term business relationships with your customers. A good CRM solution empowers a business to more efficiently and effectively manage the activities that affect its relationships with its customers, with an ultimate goal of creating a positive customer experience and building customer loyalty.

Because of its collaborative nature, Domino is the ideal platform for CRM. By leveraging your existing Domino infrastructure, you can see results much faster and at a fraction of the cost of high-end solutions from companies such as Siebel or Oracle.

I had the chance to look at Extensions for Notes by iEnterprises, Inc. (at http://www.ienterprises.com). Extensions supports many of the features found in high-end solutions costing thousands of dollars per seat--for a fraction of the cost. With Extensions, all customer information can be gleaned from your existing Lotus Notes databases and made accessible to all authorized employees without having to move back and forth from a standalone CRM system. What's also nice is that that the look and feel of the product is virtually identical whether you access it through your existing Notes client or via a Web browser.

Three basic offerings
Extensions for Notes is modular, but it comes in three basic offerings: Bronze, Silver and Gold.

The basic Bronze package allows you to track accounts, contacts, and activities. This package is perfect for an organization that wants to share information on contacts and activities only. However, this version also includes some more advanced features, such as email merge.

The Silver version includes all the modules found in the Bronze package, plus the ability to track products, projects, matters, and events. It also contains a built-in document management system complete with Microsoft Word integration, as well as a targeted discussion database.

Finally, the Gold package adds sales forecasting and opportunity management modules to the Silver feature set. All three versions also offer an optional help desk to round out the suite.