FileMaker Announces Bento 3 Contact & Customer Manager Template

13 Jan 2010

Bento 3 Contact & Customer Manager template via Bento Template Exchange

Ever since my review of Bento 3 for the Apple iPhone and Mac OS X platform, life has been that much more organized for me. And I’ll admit, I was one of those “structured yet unstructured” dudes. I knew where everything was at, lord forbid anybody that would try to follow my organized chaos.

Announced today, Filemaker has released a free Contact & Customer Manager template via the Bento Template Exchange – a free exchange of templates for Bento 3 that extends the living daylights out of Bento 3 from just an easy way to interface a deceptively simple yet powerful database that arranges notes, recipes, meetings, contacts, even contracts and invoices to an even more powerful application.

FileMaker, Inc. today announced the Bento 3 Contact and Customer Manager, a customized set of three new templates that make it easy for Mac users to organize all their contacts and customer details in one place – the perfect solution to a very popular New Year’s resolution. The Bento 3 Contact and Customer Manager includes a free 30-day trial of the popular Bento 3 personal database for Mac, plus three professionally designed, ready-to-use templates including customer and client contacts, sales receipts, and sales opportunities.

The Bento 3 Contact and Customer Manager also works with Bento for Apple iPhone and iPod Touch, so customers can organize their contacts and business activities on an Apple iPhone or iPod touch and then synchronize the information to their Mac.

“Customers and prospects can tell if you are organized – or not. By tracking notes from past meetings and conversations, upcoming to-do items, completed phone calls, and important e-mails you’ll be ready when your customers are.” said Ryan Rosenberg, vice president, marketing and services, FileMaker, Inc. “With the Bento 3 Contact and Customer Manager, we’re providing an easy and affordable way for customers to get instant access to complete contact and customer details—fully integrated with iCal Tasks and iCal Events—so they have a central hub of information that lets them stay more organized and productive.”

And yes… I’m that excited about a database program. Don’t have Bento for Apple OS X? Download a free trial here. And if you have Bento, the Contact & Customer Manager Template is free.

Thanks Beth and Carleen for the scoop and info!

[ Links: Bento 3 Contact & Customer Manager, Bento 3, RTL Bento 3 Review ]

6 Responses to FileMaker Announces Bento 3 Contact & Customer Manager Template

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January 14th, 2010 at 6:20 am

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Randy

February 24th, 2010 at 8:26 pm

This may be an elementary question but I am slowly migrating to using apple mail, ical, etc. Though I’ve been a mac guy for years. I’ve mainly been using google everything. Anyway, I have Bento 3 and have just downloaded the Contact and Customer template. My question is how can you important all contacts from address book into this template? When I open the CCM, its empty. I thought it would have already pulled the basic data from address book. Obviously I was wrong. I need to be able to input once and it appear in my add book, my iphone and laptop. Any guidance/tips are appreciated!

Aloha,
Randy
twitter: randy808
facebook: akamaiwealth

William

February 24th, 2010 at 8:40 pm

Within Bento, go to File, then Address Book, iCal and iPhoto Setup, and include Address Book data in Bento.

Also, if you have the iPhone app that goes along with the desktop, once you sync – and this is assuming that you sync your desktop Address Book.app with your iPhone – you’ll have access to your Address Book in Bento too.

I did the latter, first and that’s how it is in my desktop app as well as my iPhone app but I just helped a friend with the first way I just stated.

The best way though – make sure you’re sync’ing your iPhones Address Book/contacts via iTunes, and you’re good to go. Do not export the Address Book *.abbu file, it’s pretty much useless to Bento or most anything else other than Address Book.

Hope that helps.

Samatha

May 7th, 2010 at 12:27 pm

Hi William,

Your response answers a different question than Randy’s. I don’t think the issue is that he doesn’t have his contacts in Bento’s address book it is that those same contacts to do not automatically go into the CCM template mentioned in the article. He wanted to know if there is an easy way to import into the template. There doesn’t seem to be (unless someone knows different) and it makes the template much less nice than at first glance.

William

May 7th, 2010 at 12:33 pm

Oh, I don’t mind stating that I could have been wrong. And I see your point now after the fact… I just know that a lot of folks are having problems with the initial sync and that was something I ran into as well. Thanks for your insight, Samatha.