Dean's routine duties include a lot of stamp-collecting activities. Whenever Dean does stamp-collecting work, we'll highlight it with this little icon
.
Dean has travelled to a client's site the previous night, and booked into a hotel. He knows the area well enough to find his favourite hotel, and has booked the appointment online
a couple of weeks ahead. That evening, he looks up a local directory (whether paper or electronic, its still stamp-collecting!
) to find a place to eat. Afterwards, he connects back to the office CRM system to review past relationship with this client
. He sees that they use FudgeServer (tm) alongside his own company's products, so he looks up FudgeSoft on a general-purpose search engine
or a specialist IT site
to get some recent reviews of their products. He may send some questions back to the technical support team via email
or instant messenger
.
Keeping in contact is vital for Dean. He communicates using email, IM, phone, video-conferencing - on his laptop, his PDA or smartphone, and sometimes its nice to have a web-mail interface as backup. It's important that these systems' address books
keep in sync with one another in a way that doesn't interfere with his ability to do business.
Dean receives a lot of messages every day, from clients, from his support team and other colleagues, from salespeople, from spammers. He tracks a few technical mailing lists
and bulletin boards
too. It can take up to 3 hours a day to wade through this stuff, even though the job is made much easier for his email by the use of intelligent filtering technologies that do some of the stamp-collecting
work for him. He'd love to be able tofilter some of the bulletin board messages the same way, but as they're restricted to a web front-end, he does that by hand
, and perhaps less frequently than he'd like.

