Uncategorized

My company sells employee time-tracking software that automates client billing, project accounting and payroll. We have implemented these systems for customers repeatedly where the employees previously were unaccustomed to accounting for their time. Occasionally, this has generated some intense emot...

Mortgage lenders have improved their online customers' experience over the last year, but many Web sites still fall far short of meeting their visitors' needs, according to a report released Tuesday by a financial services customer satisfaction research firm. In a Web site study of 26 major online m...

Salesforce.com has announced its first move in what is likely to be a larger push into the content management space: the acquisition last month of Koral Technologies. Salesforce.com is leveraging the small company's technology and content management platform as the building block for Apex Content, i...

Salesforce.com on Tuesday announced its latest acquisition to the world. CEO Marc Benioff said that document management is a core element of the company's platform strategy. That strategy has been rolling out in bits and pieces since the company announced its Apex platform last year. However, it ...

An application currently in beta on Salesforce.com's AppExchange is designed especially for politicians in campaign mode. To be called (what else?) "CampaignForce.com," the product will be available in a few weeks, according to Dan Burton, senior vice president of global public policy at Salesforce....

Aiming squarely at the SOA/BPM market niche, Germany's Software AG has announced it is buying WebMethods for approximately $546 million, or $9.15 per share. The announcement was hardly unexpected, as it was clear that WebMethods needed to do something to address its scale issue, as well as other com...

Intervoice has just introduced new self-service voice products based on SCXML -- a dialogue language that can be used in multiple contexts and, most intriguingly for vendors and end users, multiple modes. In Intervoice's case, it has incorporated a runtime-service-orchestration engine based on SCXML...

The State of Texas has charged electronics retailer Radio Shack with violating state identity protection laws, claiming the company dumped thousands of customer records behind a store near Corpus Christi and possibly exposing consumers to identity theft. Radio Shack is not denying the transgression ...

When Wal-Mart imposed its seemingly -- to the suppliers at least -- draconian RFID mandate, it also held out the future promise that the cost of the technology would someday be quite affordable, perhaps as low as 5 cents per tag. That day hasn't come -- at least not yet. Currently, the cost of passi...

The stage is set for further growth in VoIP communications with technological advances, telecom market deregulation and a growing web of fiber optic and wireless networks. India is now recognized worldwide as a center for offshore call centers, but a range of companies in other emerging market count...

When Royal Caribbean tapped Steelcase Applied Research to help it outfit a new call center in Oregon, the cruise line didn't require any guidance on what chairs it wanted its reps to use. In fact, the company had given a great deal of thought to what might seem to outsiders to be the most basic of a...

Two things impressed me about Salesforce.com's Spring '07 release: the community portal and the influence of the IdeaExchange on the direction of the product. A lot of people point to the portal as the more significant and I suppose it is, but maybe only by a whisker. At the end of the day, each is...

Open source CRM vendor SugarCRM is adding service-related capabilities into its product line now that it has solidified its hold on marketing and analytics. The firm just released Project Management for its Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise product lines. In April, it will be announcing the av...

Salesforce.com's Spring '07 release, specifically the AppSpace product, is being hailed as a quantum leap forward in functionality that will support users in fulfilling their corporate missions. AppSpace, which hasn't been activated as yet, is a new product that provides users with a place to engag...

In his keynote address at Microsoft's Convergence 2007 conference in San Diego last week, CEO Steve Ballmer included a preview of the company's upcoming Dynamics CRM application, code-named "Titan." The biggest change in Titan is its full multitenancy -- that is, it uses the same multitenant code ba...