Please Help - New Salesforce User

[curioussfuser]

Hello,

I just started a Salesforce demo, and I'm currently using 37 signals Highrise CRM.  I work at a small start-up and I would be looking to use the Group edition to more efficiently manage contacts/leads and create a more structures sales pipeline.

I had a couple of questions I was hoping you could help clarify:

1)  In highrise, I often tag contacts with things like a certain conference I know they will be attending or a characteristic like "intersted in advertising" so I can easily categorize contacts into different groups and see a list of all relevant contacts by clicking tag.  Is such tagging available in Salesforce?  I'm having trouble finding this...the closest think I could find is to create a "view" in contacts but that just doesn't seem to do the trick.

2)  Highrise is really good at letting all users see a dashboard of recent activity including notes added, emails sent/"bcc-ed", etc.  Does Salesforce let you see a similar aggregated dashboard of recent activity? 

3)  I am somewhat intimidated by Salesforce's UI.  Highrise is VERY clean, fast, and simple, whereas the Salesforce demo seems to take a while to load pages and appears to be more cluttered.  Can anyone familiar with Highrise comment on this?

I would really appreciate any insights, and thank you advance for your help!  If there are any others out there who made the transition from 37 signals to Salesforce, I would really appreciate any general thoughts so I can make a more informed decision to see if the move would be the best decision for me and my business's needs.  

Thanks so much!!  

Mike

[Stevemo]

I don't have any experience with HighRise CRM, so I can't really compare the two.   

SFDC supports Record Tagging and Dashboards.  

https://na2.salesforce.com/help/doc/en/tag_records.htm#topic-title

https://na2.salesforce.com/help/doc/en/dashboards_def.htm#topic-title 

Depending on how you have your SFDC.Orgs Sharing Settings configured, users have the ability to see all Activity entered in the system.