I have been using DayLite for over a year now. My employer has invested a lot of time into setting up multiple user access to his common data base. We use DayLite for mail integration, project planning, sales tracking, contact data base, i.e. he runs his business off this software. Prior to working for this 5 person organization I was in a larger corporate environment, 2,500+ employees with IT and DB staffs using Oracle, SAP and fully supported, robust systems. DayLite from my experience is a powerful application, however we constantly have problems and have to reload the DB. I'm on my 4th re-installation of the application within 1 year. I have never experienced a system so unstable as DayLite. Being an engineer with 20 + years of experience I spoke with other experienced users to see if possibly if we were the problem, might be something on our end we were doing to cause the issues. One of my resources began working with Apple in its early days and is considered one of the top Apple consultants in the Dallas area. Several years ago she had 3 or 4 consultants that worked for her that wrote custom applications for her clients using DayLite. All of these consultants have moved away from DayLite due to the issues with this platform. I asked what is the issue and here's what I was told. DayLite was developed as a standalone, single user application and modified to work as a multiuser application versus being designed from the ground up as a multiuser application. I understand from other users it works fine as single user system. It seems to work OK if as multiuser system if one works off the live DB (shared), however you might as well go make a sandwich and come back each time you hit the live DB (10-30 second lag or longer). Yes, we tested our DNS and the quality of our connections (2 Mbps up/ 25 Mbps down). To make DayLite work due to this lag, each user has to work of their own "Offline" DB and we have it set to synch with the live DB every 5 minutes. According to my Apple consultant, this is a sign of a poorly designed DB. There are other DB's you can work off (live) from one's remote location that don't have this type of lag, which should tell one, there is an issues with DayLite. Synching is the last method one should employee to work with a DB. You are setting yourself up for corruption of your DB, which has happened with us more than once. On one occasion our synching caused the DB to duplicate records throughout the DB multiple times. With over 7,000 contact with mail integration, it took my employer several weekends, hundreds of hours to clean out the DB. He tried reloading the DB from an older copy and that failed as well. Right now I'm working of MY PC as DayLite on my Apple is being re-installed (offline DB) for the 5th time. It has been running now for 1 entire day, which is what is required. Getting back to my Apple consultant, all her clients have moved off the platform due to the reasons I'm having to live through with my current position. I next checked the web and found an attorney who had a DayLite blog, but noticed there weren't any postings from him on his blog since 2008. I contacted this attorney and he moved off the platform to cloud computing. DayLite required a lot of attention to maintain the data base and his server and he believed it was older technology and moved to cloud computing where someone else took care of these problems. Checking DayLite out myself out, they advertise 10 years, 28 employees, and customers in over 100 countries. My 1st question is how could 28 employees support a DB if it has a large user groups in 100 countries? Wouldn't they be stretched trying to support that many users? From my experience it is difficult to get help from DayLite with issues. My employer in now on his 2nd DayLite consultant.

My advice, if you are a single user, probably OK but with one of the top Apple consultants warning me about using this and spending probably 10% of my time fighting this DB and loosing time, I would not recommend using this as multiuser platform in synch mode. After having worked with Oracle and other robust platforms, if you're from a similar environment, do your homework before making the decision to use this DB. There is a reason why some very talented and exceptionally sharp professionals have moved away from this platform. Just my opinion.

No CALDAV nor invites to people outside your DL network.

Apple did the same thing with Tiger (e.g. 10.4.10 and 10.4.11)...not too unusual.

On paper, Daylite is the perfect fit for my small business. It handles contact management, scheduling and job tracking all within a handsome and easy to use interface. Plus it's made by Marketcircle, the same company that makes Billings and I already *love* Billings so I should love Daylite as well.

Unfortunately, however, things aren't quite that rosy. While Daylite does an admirable job of merging various facets of customer management and job tracking, the calendaring application leaves a lot to be desired. You can't copy and paste events, subscribe to calendars or do other basic things that even iCal handles admirably. That's disappointing considering the price and nature of this application.

The other, more pressing, problem is stability and performance. Daylite 3.9.7 was noticeably sluggish on my Mac Pro with 10gb of ram. Switching between the various panes of the application was unresponsive at times and I often found myself defaulting back ti iCal and Address book for quick tasks.

In regards to stability, I had an ongoing issue with duplicate contacts the entire time I used Daylite. Additionally I experienced many, many crashes, though in fairness to Marketcircle this very well could have been due to some corruption of my sync services. Even still, I use Things, BusyCal and other apps which tap into sync services and I've never had such a problem before.

In the end support was very helpful and offered a full refund. And although I kindly accepted it, I have to say that I do miss Daylite. There's a lot of potential here if they can just iron out the bugs.

I don't really like venting about software developers -- I know, especially in the case of software as ambitious as this, tons of time has gone into development, etc. So what I'm saying here, believe it or not, is weighted somewhat with that in mind.

Which is: you may want to try the demo out before trusting your data to anything more than the minimal claims Marketcircle makes. Especially if you'd like to use a rudimentary client/server setup vis-a-vis their Touch Server. Especially further if you have more than a couple dozen contacts or calendar entries you'd like to keep synched up.

The program looks great. It's a design marvel. And I have to believe that prior releases were more solid than the current (as of 01/14/10) "Snow Leopard Compatible" build.

But my own experience has been dismal: for any increase in productivity I thought I'd get, the numerous problems -- hard crashes, the resulting reinstallation and retooling of data -- have made this a terrible waste of money, resources, and time.

Like I mentioned already, the server/client/iPhone Touch implementation has been especially craptastic. It's not that it's necessarily impractical, or slow, or bloated. It just fails -- as in, hangs and needs to be forced-quit (with a requisite reboot), sometimes losing data, sometimes duplicating or triplicating contact info, sometimes just causing mail to crash, or sending the computer into an effective slow-mo spinning beach-ball meltdown.

This, despite dozens of troubleshooting attempts: i.e., erasing and replacing plists and/or various builds of the software itself, to simpler fixes like permissions repair and using Diskwarrior. I did all this initially with the recommendations of tech support (the plist, reinstall stuff). But after a bunch of thoughtful back-and-forths (to their credit), I was told that the latest crash log I'd sent indicated the problem was a bug in Snow Leopard. Something that Apple would have to address, and which might take a while. Only a couple of days later I saw on the Marketcircle site that Daylite was now fully Snow Leopard Compatible.

I guess in the world of software development, all rules about what's true and what's simply plausibly deniable add up to about the same thing.

Occasionally I try this program again -- after, say, an OS X software update comes out -- and it is still disappoints. The only difference is that now I wouldn't dare really trust it to begin with. If I hadn't been through so many weirdly awful iterations of trying to get this to work, I wouldn't write this. But really, be wary. I can't believe how much money and time I've wasted.