Project management software needed to organize contacts, projects, research data and more

I have a lot of balls in the air at this point, a number of business opportunities I'm exploring and each has their own topics of research (web pages, physical addresses/contact info for potential customers, industry research PDF's which I take a lot of notes from and try to keep track of where they came from,
Calls made to people involved (what was discussed, what I need to do to follow up, what I need to ask next time, etc)

Now I create a text document and save it in the folder dedicated to the specific topic/business idea, along with the PDF's, video downloads, applications/legal requirements, magazine articles, research papers, etc

The problem is I now have over 1,000 doc's from ~3 months of research and some doc's I wrote are 30-200 pages highlighting important issues from reading the material from the sites, videos, etc

I'm going to have to consolidate into an outline and then really condense the material into short notes (which makes it hard for people who haven't done the research), so I'm wondering if there should be 2 business outlines, one that is a few pages long with reference notes to the page/paragraph where it is explained in detail in the long form report.I really can't omit a lot of this stuff b/c the changes made to the current industry standards are why a new company would be successful, after studying an industry where there is an over 80% failure rate - so I was trying to outline their mistakes and show how these can be avoided and where they have extensive successful use in other industries.

But I've not yet found any software that would make the management of this type of information more streamlines and easier to deal with.

I'm open to any Microsoft based software & Linux based. I COULD go to the darkside with Apple, but it would have to be some amazing bit of code (get a used apple of course..

originally posted by: DigginFoTroof
I have a lot of balls

Me too. This is why I post on ATS.

a reply to: DigginFoTroof

Jira is pretty good:

www.atlassian.com...

Actually, it sounds like you need SharePoint or something.

Also, OneNote is very good for documents. When you do a search of digitized images it automatically searches text with built-in OCR.

a reply to: DigginFoTroof

Take a gander at Sharepoint.

We use it for some Project Management applications

Thanks for the suggestions, I'll look at those. I know there has to be something out there to keep all this mess organized but unless you have had to use it before, it's not common knowledge, from what I can tell.

a reply to: DigginFoTroof

Look up project management tools on google.

project-management.com...

This site list their top 10 PM tools.