If you’re looking for web content management systems (WCM), I have some stats that might help you key into the features you’d expect to come standard.

Here is how vendors offering web content management systems support the functionality in our model of WCM systems. These stats are based on the averages of 11441 product functionality ratings of the vendors published within our WCM knowledge base. Read the rest of this entry »

After almost a decade of following the enterprise applications market via insightful, sometimes exhaustive (and exhausting) free research articles (which will continue to go on in earnest and continue to be rated by our readers), the time has come for me to be in tune with the Web 2.0 and related social networking. In other words, the time has come for my blog at TEC, and the dilemma was then what to start with.

Well, given that facilitating impartial software selections has always been TEC’s “raison d’etre”, then the first topic should logically have something to do with that. To that end, as discussed in our now ancient article “Do You Know How to Evaluate Your Strategic Technology Provider?” , best practices drawn from TEC client organizations that have completed internal technology selections suggest that project teams should examine six key criteria groupings. The first three criteria sets should examine product specific capabilities, while the second three should investigate the software vendor’s overall corporate capabilities.

One of the later three criteria is Vendors’ Corporate Viability, defined in the above article as Read the rest of this entry »

Here at TEC, our most popular feature is something we call a Vendor Showdown. We take two or three vendors who market the same type of solution (ERP or CRM or business process management, or HR, etc.), and compare their functionalities head on. The results are based on the most recent RFI information we gather from the vendors.

As a quick example, our discrete ERP RFI contains a list of  3,690 feature functions. The vendors fill out the RFI by indicating whether or not they support each of the 3,690 feature functions, and if they do, how. For each feature function, the choice of vendor responses are: supported out of the box, not supported, supported via 3rd party solution, supported by modification, supported by customization, or not yet rated by the vendor.  All we do then is run all the responses through our decision support engine and write an article discussing the results, illustrated by some graphs. Read the rest of this entry »

Do you still read tech/business industry e-mail newsletters? In the early days of the Web, I remember going to a conference talking about the importance of developing an e-mail newsletter to communicate with customers. Now, many people simply mark the newsletters they receive as spam. A lot of e-mail services automatically mark legitimate newsletters as spam too. Are e-mail newsletters no longer useful as communication or news formats?

To publish a successful e-mail newsletter, I think you’ve got to provide something that people feel is worth subscribing to. Once you’ve accomplished that, you have to get it to them, which isn’t as simple as firing off a message from your e-mail program. Among many technical considerations, it has to get through a gauntlet of spam filtering systems that could incorrectly flag you, the sender, as a spammer.

Today, we launched a new format for the TEC Newsletter. It’s our attempt to see if we can make our newsletter more valuable to those reading it. I’d like to mention a few of the changes we made and find out whether people think we’re on the right track. Read the rest of this entry »

Newly published TEC ratings are available for a number of software vendors. Individual reports are available for purchase, or you can review the ratings in-depth using the evaluation centers. Here’s a quick rundown of the updates.

Take note if you’re in the process of evaluating any of the following systems.

• enterprise resource planning (ERP) for process manufacturing industries
• customer relationship management (CRM)
• enterprise financial software

Our public data on the BatchMaster ERP system is now up-to-date as of version 8.10, which targets medium enterprises in pharmaceutical, chemical, paint, food and beverage industries.

Version 2.0 of Vertical Marketing’s crmEZ.net covers a range of features, in particular account and contact management and opportunity management.

Following up on the financial system updates from last week, we have two more updates, this time from Infor. Our financial system knowledge base now holds the latest data on both Infor Masterpiece (previously SSA Global) and FMS SunSystems eXFM products (previously Systems Union).