Google Contacts will become a CRM solution

Today, Google has rolled out the new GMail version and it's major upgrade is the fully redesigned Google Contacts section. Now the main GMail menu consists of 3 main items: Mail, Contacts and Tasks. And while the Tasks module is still like a toy, the Google Contacts has been remaked into a grown-up contact manager with interface, similar to Gmail (which has already proved its usability). You can now assign tags to contacts, like to emails. The contact page now includes the large Notes field that is convenient to log the most important points in relationships with a person. You can also see all email conversations with this person. Besides now you can edit the contact data without switching to the edit mode (like before). But the most interesting - is not the external redesign. It turned out that Google Contacts has its own product manager - Benjamin Grol, and when he represented the new features, he noted that Google is thinking about turning Contacts into a better CRM solution.

Nevertheless, still these are just the words. Even the basic CRM feature - shared contacts - is not implemented yet in Google Contacts. Moreover, the updated Google Contacts is not yet available in Google Apps, even though the Google Apps users - the guys that actually pay for the service.