Track Everything

Functional Summary
It started with the document archiving. I had to decide how to build a general system that could support a robust notion of archiving. I finally decided that there are 5 kinds of things that could have child document libraries.

• Contacts, most familiar to all of us,
• Assets, at least for installation instructions, maintenance, warranty, etc.,
• Events, this includes the very important notions of schedules and promotional events,
• Projects, a dinner party is an event, but a superbowl is a project, with milestones, etc.
• and for good measure I added a Knowledge Base. This can be anything and many things at once.

From there it was a gush. Each of these things could benefit from not only a document repository, but also a note log. What's more, over time it became clear that I needed to enable these 5 kinds of things to relate to each other.

I had never seen an application that spanned 5 such seemingly disparate kinds of things, but it turned out that there was a warm fuzzy waiting. A couple years later when I crystalized my new startup venture of managing yacht partnerships, I did a requirements analysis. I looked at everything I expected to need at Breeze Easy, and to my pleasant surprise, every single bit of this application's support for the 5 things was going to be needed.

Case Studies
At Breeze Easy, boat owners and partner prospects are contacts. So are firms. I can define multiple locations for someone who may have multiple interests. I can also assign them to multiple groups, including asset type interests, vendor skills, whether media, whether a governmental agency, etc. I can manage each asset's schedule (events) with fine control. I use projects to track listings, escrows, sales, and projects under management. Project types define which new customers need to transmit to QuickBooks, and when new trust accounting accounts need to be created. We use the knowledge base is so many ways. It contains the system's own help content. It contains the FAQ, the News, legal case histories, destination information, and our own internal process documents to give just some of the ways it can be used.

Advanced Functionalities
An asset may or may not be owned by a contact. An event may or may not involve an asset or a contact. A project may or may not involve an asset or a client. Project milestores define which boats are listings. Assets can include office furniture, and bar coding is supported. Since the primary objects are in place, adding support for new specific functionality is only a secondary effect.