Let’s be honest with each other, contact management is a pain. It’s one thing to have difficulty keeping up with all your professional contacts, but it’s a whole other thing to have to try and organize information about all your coworkers. Everybody can relate to this, even high school students at their first job: remember the last time you got sick and had to call a coworker to make sure they were up to speed on the day’s tasks? Remember how much of a pain it was to get their number? This is exactly the sort of dilemma that EasyGrouper is trying to fix — but they’ve managed to go way beyond the needs of a simple address book without complicating anything. Let’s dive in to this EasyGrouper review and take a look at what makes EasyGrouper a good buy.

EasyGrouper Review – About the Company

EasyGrouper is developed by a privately held company called IT Cadre, a technology solutions firm from Virginia. Like all great products, EasyGrouper was born out of necessity: every employee had a smart phone, but they didn’t all work in one place. Many worked from home, or out in the field.

Reaching somebody was a near impossibility for many people, and it became a long chain of phone calls trying to find a coworker’s number. How ironic that smartphones weren’t smart enough to deal with this problem already! Noticing this correlation, IT Cadre built a solution for the lowest common denominator: the smartphones everybody in the firm already had. The app has been in development and use at IT Cadre for over a year, and you can tell — it reeks of polish.

Main Functionality of EasyGrouper

EasyGrouper is all about maintaining contact with your employees and coworkers — and not just in the sense that you have their contact information. You’ll be able to tell what group (or, more traditionally, department) your coworkers are a part of. You can check their status to see if they’re in or not. You can even send them direct links and they will load in their phone’s browser.

Speaking of apps, there’s an app available for both iPhone and Android phones. On my iPhone, the app looks really nice and is in perfect sync with the Web tool. As an administrator, I can accomplish almost all the same things from the app that I can with the website, and that’s pretty cool — and very handy.

Benefits of Using EasyGrouper

The real main functionality of EasyGrouper is twofold: first of all, it allows companies to avoid investing in their own server just to maintain corporate contacts for all their employees (à la Microsoft Exchange Server or Blackberry Enterprise Server). Second of all, companies can use EasyGrouper to encourage their employees to bring their own devices and increase overall workplace satisfaction — a hugely important metric for staff retention.

There are a ton of other benefits too. Administrators and other individuals with the privilege can send group messages. Links can be shared via text, and they open in the device’s browser. If an employee leaves the company, they can be removed from the database without any harm done. Plus, the databases don’t sync with your personal address book — so the regular Contacts app on your iPhone can continue to be used for your life outside of work without fear.

One nice feature as well is the status sharing. It’s similar to sharing a Facebook status or a tweet. From the app, you can choose to let people know what you’re up to with quick little statuses like “do not disturb” or “out to lunch,” or even “in a meeting.” You can also set expected durations for these periods of time, which let everybody know when you’re not around to take their calls.

Finally, the location and group features are worth mentioning as well, just so I can tell you about how thorough EasyGrouper is. The app comes set up for companies with multiple locations, allowing you to keep track of directions to different offices and coordinators/managers in different places. It also comes set up for groups, which I like to think of as divisions. A person’s role in the group is next to their name, so it’s easy to know who does what.

If you need to contact everybody in a group or a location at once, it’s easy to do that. Both the group and location pages allow you a place to store information about them, like pictures, links, emails, and whatever else might be necessary to get the jobs done. They’re easy to access for everybody, not just the administrator, and they’re easy to keep track of.

The Basics: What Does It Look Like

EasyGrouper is a really simple, minimalist app designed to get you straight to the point and then get you out. Whether you’re adding an employee, location, or group to the database, you’ll find that the user interface gets out of the way as quickly as possible.

Clean look & feel

Most of the Web interface is simply about lists. There’s a dashboard, but it’s a list of employees and information.

Dashboard

Even adding a new employee or coworker to the database is just filling in a list.

Adding a contact

The app is a whole different experience. It’s still about lists, but it’s about making lists as easy to access as possible. It’s about making information as simple to edit, and statuses as easy to compose as can be.

Status edit

I think they did a pretty good job on it, and I have no complaints — if I was working for a Fortune500 company, I’d have no qualms with making this the contacts app I spent most of my time in.

Support Information

There’s a Help page that looks like it has some information, and from within your account you can get support information in the profile screen of the app. You can also email support from your account settings.

However, I found support information somehow difficult to find which is small problem that needs to be remedied as soon as possible. Promising support within 24 hours via email would be a step in the right direction.

Pricing Information

There are four different tiers of EasyGrouper available in a range from $30-$200/month, depending on the size of your company (and if you need more than that, EasyGrouper will still take care of you if you let them know your needs). $30 is enough for 25 users, $50 gets you 50 users, and so on and so forth.

These are monthly payments taken right off of a credit card. There’s also a free trial available for 45 days, with no credit card required — just the right amount of free time to instil a real need for the service in your team.

EasyGrouper Review – The Bottom Line

EasyGrouper is a great, smart service with a ton of value. It’s a tool that does one thing exceptionally well, and those are usually the best tools to have in your pocket. The fact that EasyGrouper is basically a smartphone app, and it can fit in your pocket, makes it an even better deal.

I’d highly recommend EasyGrouper for any company that needs contact maintenance. It could improve on support, but for now, the Help page seems to answer most potential questions. Otherwise, EasyGrouper is an easy-to-use service that your employees and/or coworkers are going to love.

Ratings: ease of use 5/5, features 4/5, value 4/5