Author Archives: Wayland Bruns

About Wayland Bruns

Wayland founded CompanionLink in 1987 as The Jorf Company, a maker of shareware 4gl products. As a leading maker of CRM Add-On products, the company started with Sync Products in 1996 for the PalmPilot. As CEO of CompanionLink, Wayland strives to balance quality customer service, products with good value, low prices, and a positive workplace..

Reserve Galaxy Note 10 for Sync from Outlook, Act!, Goldmine, and Palm Desktop

Posted on by Wayland Bruns

Samsung has now made available a reservation system for Galaxy Note 10.

Here is sign up form for marketing emails from Samsung. It looks like there is no obligation to actually purchase, you do not need to submit a credit card. Check it out:

https://www.samsung.com/us/mobile/reserve/

I have carried a Note phone since the very first. I really like the larger screen size. Galaxy Note 10 will be the latest flagship from the world leader of Smartphones. Apparently there will be two versions; Galaxy Note 10 which has a very large screen, and Galaxy Note 10 Plus, with an even larger screen. Both phones are expected to have 5G support and be thinner and lighter than their predecessors.

For the best Contact and Calendar Management on Galaxy Note 10, check out DejaOffice CRM for Android. You can download this free from the Google Play Store.

Special features of DejaOffice:

  • Time zone management, so when you land your Calendar doesn’t go wonky
  • Calendar Colors that match Outlook
  • Templates that save time entering new Appointments and Tasks
  • Persistent alarms to be sure I don’t miss anything.
  • Recurring tasks compatible with Outlook
  • Optional:  Franklin Covey task priorities  A1, B2, C99
  • Works same on Android and iPhone, Phones and Tablets.

How to Sync Outlook Contacts with Android: Use CompanionLink for easy and secure sync from Outlook to your Pixel 3a phone. This is a better system than Google, who sells your data, or Microsoft who hosts your data on their exchange server. Here are some setup guides for CompanionLink sync:

CompanionLink for Outlook
Average User Rating:
Average rating: 4.86 out of 5 based on 630 reviews.
Free 14 day trial. Price $14.95 3-Mo Subs - $69.95 One-time License.



Affiliate Opportunities with DejaOffice PC CRM

Posted on by Wayland Bruns

DejaOffice PC CRM is a unique opportunity. Released in 2019, it can capture a new market customer who are looking for a fast, secure, on-premise CRM program.

It is ideally suited for customers who are a single-person business, and small companies up to 25 sales people. DejaOffice is PC based, the database is local on your hard disk. This makes it unique in the modern CRM marketplace which is almost entirely cloud based.

Affiliate Sales for Business CRM Customers

We offer an Affiliate program that will pay 20% back for every recommendation you make for Business CRM Customers. A Business license generally runs $99 for the Outlook version, $129 for the “Express” CRM and $199 for the 5-User license. So the Affiliate payment is $20, $25 and $40 respectively. You get this in the month following your customer’s purchase. You need do nothing more than promote the program with your link and you get credit for every purchase.

Service business for Localized CRM Customers

DejaOffice is fully Unicode compliant and currently localized with 12 languages. We will work with vendors to produce more localized versions. This allows you to promote DejaOffice for your own community in your own language. You can then become the support representative for your area, deriving sales and revenue by providing technical assistance.

For instance, a Latvian business may wish to set up a Latvian website to promote and sell DejaOffice in the Latvian language. We will assist in working with you to build your language into DejaOffice PC CRM, and Android and iPhone CRM products. Once built, we will maintain these languages in our product releases.

In addition to Affiliate sales, you will find that customers readily need assistance with technical issues, moving databases, and connecting the DejaOffice data to their other business systems. You can easily set up a fee based service business handling this type of service.

To Sign up as an affiliate partner click here. Please write to us about any opportunities you would like to pursue. We are happy to partner with everyone.

about any opportunities you would like to pursue. We are happy to partner with everyone.

. Please write to us about any opportunities you would like to pursue. We are happy to partner with everyone.

Why DejaOffice PC CRM is the Best CRM for 2019

Posted on by Wayland Bruns

Salesforce has made CRM synonymous with Cloud Computing. However, Cloud Computing has a number of obvious flaws, and for many small business owners, PC based CRM is the right solution.

For people who have fewer than 20,000 customers, and want to track history, events and tasks for those customers, a cloud based solution may be too slow and cumbersome. Business people are quite obviously focused on their business. They lack the time to learn slow and cumbersome tools more suited to large corporation with 200,000 customers.

Every small business person has a PC. This is essential for basic tools like accounting, printing, taxes, regulatory filing, and processing orders. Small business is not a game that can be run on an app on your phone. It is a serious endeavor that requires effective records and communications.

Since you have a PC, why do your customer management in the cloud?

Cloud based solutions have the following flaws:

  1. Cloud CRM is slow to use. It takes time to open your browser, search for a customer, schedule a follow up, and make call notes.
  2. Cloud CRM is expensive. Decent cloud solutions are priced by the month often costing $200 per year or more. If you do not pay, you do not get access to your data. While Zoho and Hubspot offer free alternatives, they are limited in scope.
  3. Cloud CRM is not secure. The first thing that Salesforce, Hubspot and other CRM products do is to connect your data to Google, which will make money by selling it, or Microsoft, which is renown for data leaks.
  4. Cloud CRM Mobile Apps perform poorly on the road. Very few Cloud CRM products support free mobile apps, and those that do offer limited browsing and phone capability. Many are not true apps at all but simply a web browser view to the online database. If you are out of range, you cannot make notes about your meeting.

DejaOffice absolutely solves these issues:

  1. DejaOffice is lighting fast. You can answer the phone, search for a contact, schedule a meeting and make call notes in less than 10 seconds. DejaOffice is always available on your PC, even if your internet is not connected.
  2. DejaOffice PC CRM is available for a one-time low price.
  3. DejaOffice PC CRM can encrypt the database, and makes automatic backups of your database. You can be secure that your data is local, safe, and protected.
  4. DejaOffice CRM for Android and iPhone are true Apps that are well rated and have local data. They run fast, and integrate with native phone capabilities. You can download DejaOffice from the App Store now.

DejaOffice PC CRM comes in four flavors:

Standalone – for Contacts, Calendar, Tasks and Notes on your PC.

Outlook Add-In – For those that use Outlook as a primary customer management tool, and Add-In that automates creating Contacts, Calendar and History from your Email Inbox.

Express – Complete CRM Tracking that includes Deals (Opportunities) and integration with leading CRM tools like Act! and Goldmine.

Pro – Five User license with the Express capabilities.

Each of these versions has a free two week trial. Also available are RunStart and Premium Support service where we will assist you to import your existing data and switch over to this new PC based CRM tool.

Google Calendar Down – How to sync Outlook without Google

Posted on by Wayland Bruns

Google Calendar and G-Suite Calendar is experiencing a worldwide outage.

This is a great time to remind people that “big data” has a problem. Google, Microsoft and Apple want to tie you into their corporate cloud ecosystem. The flaw is that it will put your business down if you depend on them.

There is an alternative.

CompanionLink is a vendor of non cloud-based tools. We have a cloud sync system, but it’s only role is to transport your data. With our tools your data is entirely contained on your PC, your Android Phone, your iPhone and your iPad. So when the data network is down, or when your internet is connected, you can continue to add, schedule, complete and make notes. When your phone connects later, the sync will “catch up” to all your devices.

DejaOffice for Android features Android Widgets that give a great preview of your day today.

DejaOffice for iPhone has a highly secure data model and lets you store hidden data in your database. This is great for password or other confidential information.

DejaOffice for PC offers an array of multi-user and secure options, as well as Live Windows Widgets that let you add events and notes without opening any App.

When you need to move data from Outlook to your Phone, keep in mind that CompanionLink and DejaOffice can do this without sharing your data with Google, Microsoft or Apple.

CompanionLink for Outlook
Average User Rating:
Average rating: 4.86 out of 5 based on 630 reviews.
Free 14 day trial. Price $14.95 3-Mo Subs - $69.95 One-time License.

Is Privacy a Luxury Good?

Posted on by Wayland Bruns

Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently opined that “privacy cannot be a luxury good offered only to people who can afford to buy premium products and services” (NYT – May 7 2019). This bears a look at whether privacy is free, or something to be paid.

Read the comments of the article to see through the statement. Google claims to respect privacy, at the same time as working hard to undermine it. No one is fooled when it comes to Google and Privacy; if you use their free services, you have no right to stop them from monetizing that service by selling your data.

Pay for Cloud, Pay for Privacy

At CompanionLink we offer DejaCloud as a paid service. As a paid service, our sole source of income on DejaCloud is the money that is paid. We also offer Software as a paid service. And our only source of income is what people pay to us.

The has come an expectation from some people that software should be free. Vendors like Google and Facebook push free service as a model. But they would not be corporations if they had no income, so you need to watch carefully where that income is coming from.

Apple and Microsoft are not far removed from the fray. Although Apple charges for their phones, they offer free iCloud service. There are serveral reports that Apple monetizes iCloud service by sharing your data with Google. Microsoft has also spoken clearly about monetizing Windows 10 by tracking your purchases.

At CompanionLink we have a simple love for how software used to work. You buy it, you own it. No one should have ulterior motives in selling your data. We make upgrades available and send marketing to our customers as a way to keep our revenue stream steady and provide needed support to our customers. When they get a new PC or new phone, they may not need to pay at that time for an upgrade. But the average of all upgrades has to be there for our team to be able to provide the needed products and services.

At least with CompanionLink and DejaCloud, your data is secure, and not being sold to the highest bidder. We hope through our basic product revenue to stay that way for the future.

CompanionLink Express updated for Salesforce Outlook Sync

Posted on by Wayland Bruns

CompanionLink has updated CompanionLink Express for to better support Outlook Sync with Salesforce. Salesforce recently discontinued Salesforce for Outlook Sync. CompanionLink Express is a drop-in replacement for the discontinued product. The new solution from Salesforce is to use their Office 365 and Lightning Integration, which is not an option for people who use POP3, IMAP, or Standalone Outlook folders or who use a private Exchange server that cannot connect to Salesforce.

CompanionLink Express – Sync Salesforce with Outlook on your PC

CompanionLink has long supported Outlook to Salesforce Sync using our CompanionLink Professional product. Today we are moving this capability to our lower priced CompanionLink Express product, and re-launching our landing page for this product.

CompanionLink Express can synchronize Outlook 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019 and Office 365 with Salesforce. Contacts, Calendar and Tasks are synchronized. CompanionLink also synchronizes Salesforce Accounts to the Outlook Contact list (with the notation “Acct”) and Salesforce Opportunities to the Outlook Task list (with the notation “Oppt”). More information can be found in the setup guide.

This product is needed by people who use Outlook folders that are on Exchange, like POP3 and IMAP folders, or where the Exchange permissions on the folder are such that Salesforce cannot access it. In these cases, a PC side program is required.

CompanionLink Express costs $79.95 for a one-time purchase, or if you like a recurring charge $19.95 once every three months. You can download a 14 day trial from this page: https://www.companionlink.com/salesforce/outlook/

CompanionLink Express
Average User Rating:
Average rating: 4.86 out of 5 based on 630 reviews.
Free 14 day trial. Price $19.95 3-Month Sub - $99.95 One-time License.

Case Study: Android Outlook USB Sync causing Windows Sockets Error

Posted on by Wayland Bruns

A customer contacted us this week who had been using a competing Android Outlook Sync product. A Windows Update caused the sync to fail with a Windows Sockets error.

We recommended CompanionLink for Outlook, which can synchronize directly from Outlook to Android using a USB Cable. There are a number of Outlook Android sync products, but only a few companies will handle it like old Palm Hotsync from PC to Phone using a USB cable.

The customer was in a hurry, having already spent hours on the problem. So we recommended our RunStart service. With this service a technician logs into the computer to set up the software. The sync needs to match up the Contacts and Calendar items that are already on the phone, so it is helpful for an experienced technician to watch for any problems with duplicate data.

It is not uncommon to see duplicate data when switching from one sync product to another. The reason is that your data is already on both sides of the sync. So if there is any formatting changes, a computer product may not recognize similar contact and calendar data. CompanionLink 8 contains a dedupe utility that can quickly clear duplicates from Outlook and your Phone. There is no extra charge for this function.

CompanionLink offers a competitive upgrade for anyone who has purchased a product from one of our competitors. You can purchase the “Upgrade” price, even if you are buying from CompanionLink for the first time. Here is a link for a Competitive Upgrade to CompanionLink for Outlook.

Here is a link with added RunStart service, and an additional $10 off your purchase – total $78.95. With this service, you will be on a fresh new solution in just a few minutes, and ready to carry on your normal day’s business.

CompanionLink for Outlook
Average User Rating:
Average rating: 4.86 out of 5 based on 630 reviews.
Free 14 day trial. Price $14.95 3-Mo Subs - $69.95 One-time License.

WSJ Shockingly Good Phone article features Nokia 7.1

Posted on by Wayland Bruns

The Wall Street Journal published a great article this week called: Shockingly Good Smartphones You Can Get for $350 or Less (WSJ -Paywall).

It makes a point that we tend to think of first-run phones as being $1000. But that there is a variety of Mid-Priced phones that are pretty effective.

The main recommendation is Nokia 7.1 which happens to be one of my favorite phones. As the Article points out, it is a good modern phone running Android Oreo 8.1, with a nice screen, good camera and is pretty free of the bloatware that comes on Android devices.

The other featured phones in the article are the Lenovo Moto G7, and the Xiaomi Pocophone F1.

For all the mid-range phones, you can download DejaOffice from the Android App Store, and easily set up CompanionLink for Outlook to synchronize Outlook to the phone. DejaOffice for Android features widgets for the Android home screen to show your calendar, Category colors on Calendar, and integrated Tasks and Contacts so your whole work desktop is in one place on your phone.

It’s great to see Nokia is back to making great main stream phones again!

CompanionLink for Outlook
Average User Rating:
Average rating: 4.86 out of 5 based on 630 reviews.
Free 14 day trial. Price $14.95 3-Mo Subs - $69.95 One-time License.

Case Study: Migrate from Microsoft BCM to DejaOffice PC CRM for Outlook

Posted on by Wayland Bruns

Recently we were approached by a customer who used to use BCM, and wanted a solution that worked with Office 365.

The customer had used Microsoft Business Contact Manager from 2013 to 2018. They had Contacts, Accounts and Communication History. This customer had tried a migration tool to move BCM contacts to Office 365 contacts. This tool was not successful. (CompanionLink Professional can move BCM Contacts to Outlook contacts using a folder-to-folder sync.)

At the time the customer contacted us, they had not used BCM for many months. So the BCM database was out of date.

Our new product DejaOffice PC CRM for Outlook adds certain CRM functions to Office 365 Outlook (Outlook 2019). Among these functions are History Also, DejaOffice can import from older CRM systems like Microsoft BCM which was discontinued in 2016.

The customer also purchased Premium Support, which is a service where our technician could log into his computer and set everything up.

What we did was Sync the old BCM database to DejaCloud. We moved the Accounts, Contacts and Communication History. Then on the new computer, the customer installed DejaOffice PC CRM for Outlook. In addition, the customer uses a Mobile Phone and DejaOffice has the complete database there also.

The entire operation of moving the old database to DejaCloud, and sync to the new PC took our technician about 30 minutes. Most of this time was checking the data each step of the way. The actual sync time was about five minutes for both sync phases.

Now, the customer can make a new contact from an Outlook email. When they look up a Contacts, they an see the communications history imported from the old PC. And they have Caller ID and History on their Phone.

Here is a link to order this same service – DejaOffice PC CRM for Outlook along with Premium installation and one year of support. Give us a call at (503)243-3400 to schedule an installation or talk about your needs.

DejaOffice PC CRM Standalone
Average User Rating:
Average rating: 4.86 out of 5 based on 630 reviews.
Free 14 day trial. Price $69.95



DejaOffice responds to Google Disruption

Posted on by Wayland Bruns

The high tech keyword for our century is Disruption.  Investors seek disruptive partners.

Disruption means an innovative company enters a stable market environment, generally with a low cost service, and knocks the current players out of the market by providing lower prices and better service. In this sense, Google has been disruptive to the Search Engine industry by providing a fast effective tool without visible advertising.  They have also disrupted the Cell Phone OS market, the Internet Browser market, and the Online News market. They have captured a firm lead in all these areas.

There is a second aspect to disruption that investors seek.  Once a company gains ascendancy over the competition, the disruptive company raises their prices to consumers so that the disruptive company becomes highly profitable. Consumers end up being worse off than they were before.

With Google, the profit motive appears to increasingly be made by isolated Silicon Valley based executives, with little feel for how they play out in the real world.  It is a sad truth that where Google once stood for innovation and low cost development tools, now they are nearly a constant headache to fend off their mistaken motivations and increasing prices.

Google Calendar API – Batch Endpoints Change

In March 2018, Google Announced that their Batch Endpoint for many API commands was changing.  The current API URL is to be deprecated March 25th 2019.  Somehow, Google figures that every customer with an API dependent software tool created before March 2018 will update their tool within this year grace period.  Clearly Google Management has no idea how long software cycles are.  We still have customers using Windows XP!  No one likes to change software versions.  More information is available here: https://www.companionlink.com/support/google-batch-endpoint-advisory.html

Google Geocoding API – Whopping Price Increase

In June 2018, Google announced that their website Geocode API was going to increase their pricing.  Geocoding is what is used when we look up an address, and replace it with a Logitude/Latitude value for map purposes.  Google Geocoding also includes location pictures and mini-map.  We use this in DejaOffice for iPhone, DejaOffice for Android and DejaOffice on the PC.

The price for a basic lookup changed from $0.005 per lookup to $0.02 per lookup.  What this means for DejaOffice is that our service in map lookups changed from being under $100, to suddenly becoming a $2000 per month bill.  This is for a free APP on the App store!  We quickly changed our Android and IPhone map lookups to the new Mobile Maps API, which was suggested by Google as an alternative. Customers saw this change go into place in November, and it seems to be a good drop-in replacement.

Google Geocoding API – Whopping Price Increase – Redux

So in February, Google announces that they “improved” the Mobile Maps API.  We have a six month window to switch to the improved version.  The improved version will change $0.02 per lookup.  Just Wow!

First we have a required App change, and second, we get our $2000 bill back.

So in DejaOffice you can count on mapping changes again in the next four months.  It is likely we will add an in-app tool to add funds for people who use a lot of mapping features.  Also we will be adding more location info to our sync, so once you map a contact or calendar event, you do not have to look it up again, thus avoiding a chargeable item.  Isn’t Disruption fun!

Google READ_SMS and READ_CALL_LOG Permissions

In November 2018, Google informed us that they would be removing all apps that used READ_SMS permission on Android.  In DejaOffice, we use these to add SMS text to Contact History.  We also use READ_CALL_LOG to add call followup information, and DejaOffice Caller ID.

Google’s handling of this issue is largely machine based, and heavy handed.  We have requested an exception.  However, DejaOffice does not fit into their set list of apps that are allowed these permissions.  They will remove DejaOffice from the App store if we do not remove these capabilities from the App.  We have applied twice, but can’t get by their machine blocker (probably named HAL – Open the Bay Door, Hal!)

So in February 2019, we have been forced to remove a number of DejaOffice features from our Android product:

  1. Read SMS Text to Contact History
  2. Identify incoming calls using DejaOffice Contact list
  3. Follow up on inbound calls to add a Contact History item

We are seeking another external tool, maybe Whatsapp, which may allow us to restore this functionality through that tool.  But obviously, Google Android is wanting to limit our access, and cannot be flexible because an innovative product does not fit their rigid expectations.

Google is a great technology partner.  But these moves show they clearly are going the path of IBM, then Microsoft, then Apple, then Google.  An innovative Disruptor, upon market dominance, becomes an intractable barrier to innovation.