Pay what you want for Zoho's new contact management

You probably have heard of the Zoho CRM application: now, the cloud applications provider has created software for providing central management of your business contacts. And after a free trial, you can pay whatever you want to use it.

The new offering, called Zoho ContactManager, is designed to keep all of your company's business contacts in one unified location instead of scattered between all the different mobile phones and desktop organizations that your team is using.

It integrates with Google Apps and includes native mobile applications that allow for viewing or editing from an Apple iOS or Android mobile device. The application also works with the Zoho Card Scanner application for iPhones, which lets you "scan" business cards into a digital form by snapping an image of them.

Here are some of the other features:

• Multi-user management, which lets different team members add and organize their contacts in one location
• Centralized view of any tasks, outreach or "events" that are related to a contact
• The ability to distribute follow-up tasks related to interaction with a contact
• A "sharing" feature that alerts the team whenever there's something new going on

I wasn't kidding about the pricing model: Zoho has adopted a policy called "Pay What You Want."  After the trial, you can set the per-user price where you want, down to a minimum of $1 per user per month.

Collectively, Zoho's applications are used by more than 8 million users. The company also sells IT management software (ManageEngine) and a network management suite (WebNMS).