You say no-one will convery because your app is not fundamentally changing how they work.

How about you get really intimate with what they use, how they use it, and work on simplifying workflow UI, readability, all the human factors stuff which seems to be overlooked once a project gets rolled out because the painful bit of codifying processes too all the budget?

I mean, work out what you could overlay as a benefit, in a drop - in app. Ignore bling, save where used to flag data that needs working on urgently, and think about that old hullabaloo of the 70's consultant with clipboard: time and motion. Think how many times a UI context switch is required. Take away frustrations.

Obviously i've no idea if what yu're working on is the slightest bit suitable fr this treatment. But if i had a nickel for every time i've seen a support rep slam down their phone (i was going to say smashed, but we're all enlightened PC people now!) because of something as dumb as having to hit the fourth button on their machine to transfer a call, i'd be doing pretty good.

It's not fair of me to keep using phone use analogies, but i don't se enough info as to what other people ar trying to solve here, hope you get my drift anyhow.

Can you write "helper app"? Remember multifinder or i forget the name but whatever it was on early macs which allowed you to copy and paste to a stack? Id there something functionally simple like that you can offer which doesn't mess with the underlying interfaces, but which still requires some pretty neat writing and likely a fairly deep understanding of the existing apps to make work consistently and without snarling anything?

Whenever i get private project time, increasingly rare sadly, i keep sketching out UI models for a desk phone which would be complimentary to the tracking / contact apps i use, not be a awful ugly alterntive. Things like flipping a contact window from the list on the handset to my main monitor. The hard bit isn't so much now i have to work out a way to communicate that from phone to PC, because one way would be to loop the phone data to the PC and use the new USB screen driver tech. The hard bit is working out what you want to really happen. Is that, you finger flip a contact towards your main screen, and you get a fully expanded list of the discussions you've had with them? Can drag and drop work with this in a kind of wacom tablet way, so then hw does movement on the obviously smaller touchscreen translate to your main monitor? If, say, i've a preference for greyscale display on anything which cannot be usefully colored to convey real information, does the "flipped" window stay greyscale? Do i want the flipped window to be large, float or be even a normal window, or do i want it "brought back" / closed by a gesture on the phone screen? How could i do that from a cell phone?

That's pretty pie in the sky for a solo project, but whilst there remains good utility from desk bound objects (my favourite gripe is i can dial important customer numbers from memory faster than i can bring their entry up on my very latest processor Nokia) and these objects, like everything else, wear out, and are now nicely converging to voip protocols which are mature enough there's no reason to go for a proprietary type such as cisco, theres a market for these things.

Making any of this elegant is no small ambition. But consider this thought, that i remember new employees getting "phone training" because they needed to know how to handle the butt ugly interfaces of pbx attached phones which to this day are not often much better than a bunch of soft keys and if you're lucky those keys are customisable but still very basic features. Why can't i drag and drop a call with my finger whilst i'm on another call? The other thing is with the iphone we really have a lot of people finding new ways to use a telephone, and hat idiom i think will spread to the desk phone. Suddenly it may not be necessary to train someone how to put a call on hold, transfer and pick up the next incoming without muffing it with fat fingers. If i remember, AT&T research got quite far as to graphical interfaces, i think the device was called an I-O or something. It ran on an ATM network for the prototypes.

I can;t quite be apologetic about my phone obsession. Companies still buy an awful lot of desk phones, and getting those to work with even simple contact apps is often a total PITA, and not much benefit is derived. Make the right connector, and you've a very interesting straddle market, selling forklift hardware upgrades and the back - end to make them play nice. Ouch, i just remembered that awful word "middleware"!

About the time they ran those Apple ads where some exec thought his staff were taking office computers home, but instead was told they were bringing their macs to work, i worked front line call center as a first job, where the productive people brought in their own phones and headsets, and went to extremes to patch them in to the corp pbx. That time, the phone of choice was a AT&T model with a 4 line VFD which we could read even in bright light and at an acute angle, and which you could "alpha tag" your incoming numbers, basic caller identity, but which the official office system supposedly didn't support, but did, and we hacked (nicely) our own caller groups so we could take decent length breaks and be covered by a buddy across the room. Make that stuf real simple, and - apart from the up tight "Office the movie" kind of echoes this gives off, yu have a lot of people in regular jobs wanting your kit badly.

Idle random thoughts, really. I think this pretty uncool bit of daily work is simply under cared for. Yet there are an awful lot of very big businesses for which the phone is their primary income point. Maybe if this ageing tech actually worked well, we'd not have outsourced call centers because center staff could actually be more productive. At least in that dimension. I've too many "account managers" at our telco who're authorized to do diddly squat to assist me, which is likely the reason senior mgmt don't care for which pbx / phones they use.

Outside of big "old economy" shops, however, this sort of thing could really help small dev shops get their customer relations under control. It's not organization per se - we can all be very controlled as to contact management - but take away just one bit of meatspace logic burden and i know i'd have considerably more time to write. Instead of contact management, i call it "distraction management".

I'm probably candidate for most boring post now, so i'll go curse at my phone's voicemail access system now!