Daylite tries to capture everything needed in a small business or inside a team within a company.

A users perspective on Daylite

From a users point of view, roughly classify the "things" that are needed to 'get things done' in a business into a pyramid with 3 layers.

The bottom layer is the Things layer. This layer consists of tasks, appointments, forms, notes, emails, and files.

The middle layer is the Contacts layer. This layer consists of people, companies, and users. You may start as a single business owner, but as you grow, you will need to track your customers, staff, competitors, etc. In addition, to be able to trade, you must develop relationships with other people and companies; hence, tracking your contacts is very important.

The top layer is the Objectives layer. Opportunities represent the potential for new business— for example, signing a contract, approving a proposal, etc. Once you win new business, it’s time for you to deliver, and this is represented by a project. You set up a project to track the entire piece of work you do for a client. This crucial top layer symbolizes new business coming in and promises being delivered.

A developers perspective on Daylite

From a developers point of view, we see Daylite as a cyclic, partially directed graph. One of the core features of Daylite is that users can "link" objects to other objects.
Some of those objects have a clear direction (e.g. a Task belongs to a larger project), some of undirected (e.g. a Project is related to another Project). There are also some are directed into both direction, but the relationship is different in each direction (e.g. Company A has subsidiary B. From Company A's point the relationship is "subsidiary," but from Company B's point of view the relationship is "parent company")

You can learn more about the different kinds of relationships in the Links, Roles, and Relationships section

Daylite allows users to classify objects in a variety of ways. The most common are Categories and Keywords. Every object (except Users and Files/URLs) can have a Category and multiple Keywords. Users can define Categories and Keywords, however, Daylite ships with a pre-defined set of Categories and Keywords, as well as templates known as "Industry Packs." In addition to Categories and Keywords, like user-defined object specific classifications static, static object specific classifications, and labels for inline attributes.

You can learn more about the different kinds of classifications in the Object Classifications section