Salesforce.com has interesting news this week. The company launched a new service, Force.com Checkout, allowing customers to buy and sell AppExchange apps online anytime, anywhere, from a browser.
The Checkout is like a “one stop shop” allowing you to trial, pay for, start using, and manage subscriptions of Salesforce CRM and some of your favorite AppExchange partner apps.
A bit early, I know, but some of us early birds are already coming up with New Year’s resolutions. It’s amazing how the resolution lists can be quite similar from year to year (like working out more or eating healthy food never comes off the list, not surprisingly).
Well, it turns out resolutions could really work for businesses too! I had a conversation with a friend of yesterday and he was telling me that it’s a real “ritual” in their company, where people in each department come up with a work-related New Year’s resolution and then stick to it throughout the year.
Last year aside from “drinking less coffee at work”, “coming in on time”, etc., their resolution included “bringing all customer-related activities onto a single platform”. He says it actually worked and made things a lot easier for sales and marketing. So, I guess resolutions are not all that personal after all.
Thought of integrating your applications enterprise-wide? Well, you could make up a resolution to bring the dirty data and disparate applications with duplicate data to book in the new year.
What it takes? Setting up a clear and solid plan, appointing people responsible for the plan to be carried out, and sticking to the plan… Sounds so easy, doesn’t it?
Filed under: Data Mashup, EAI — Alena Semeshko @ 3:25 am
Social networks are only getting bigger, aren’t they? Even SugarCRM now has a plug in got LinkedIn.
Commercial open-source CRM (customer relationship management) vendor SugarCRM said Monday it will give customers the ability to plug in feeds from third-party data sources like the business social-networking site LinkedIn.
This new feature comes with the new SugarCRM 5.2 release coming out this month.
According to Martin Schneider, director of product marketing at SugarCRM, it’s all about keeping users in a CRM context and bringing content into the CRM.
As a result LinkedIn data can be imported into SugarCRM and pop-ups with relevant user-information will appear.
Just found a piece from on the database management. To brush up on your database management strategy, check if you have any of the typical mistakes listed below.
Lack of specified data entry policies and procedures, hence no one knowing and applying them.
Using Excel as if it were a database (JUST a spreadsheet, okay?)
Having no one in charge of data entry/data quality training.
Forgetting all about backups, or running them way too seldom.
Allowing staff to copy sensitive information onto portable devices and take it home.
Insufficient password security measures.
Error management? Lack of error management strategies, careless data handling by staff.
Keeping your user access rights and security options a mess.
Not about you? Then congratulations, your database management efforts don’t need a fix.
I’m sure you’ve already heard how Gartner forecasts the worldwide enterprise Software as a Service market to jump up to $6.4 billion this year, up 27% from 2007. Moreover, the company estimates the market will reach $14.8 billion in 2012. Among the reasons for such progress are:
*the tough economy (ironically, yea?),
*better broadband,
*and a need to rapidly deploy software to meet a specific business need.
Gartner’s research director, Sharon Mertz, notes that on-demand services have gained popularity and matured, diminishing the widespread initial concerns over security, response time, and service availability.
, TMCnet Contributing Editor, recently wrote on customer relationship management delivered via SaaS, particularly on SugarCRM.
He calls SugarCRM the primary open source SaaS option and discusses a few of its new features from the latest release. The cool thing about open source in terms of CRM is that tools to link the data from any other systemare more abundant and, as a rule, not that complicated in use.
Apatar, for instance, excludes manual coding once and for all in terms of synchronizing data between SugarCRM and other applications:
The application’s drag-and-drop interface allows this type of data migration from/to and synchronization with SugarCRM to be carries out by literally anyone.
