SAP has announced that it now offers online training for university students. Upon completion of training programs, students may obtain SAP certifications. The initiative sustained by the SAP Education organization and the SAP University Alliances program is meant to address the work market demand for SAP-accredited professionals. Read the rest of this entry »

KANA Software, Inc. has announced a new version of its LAGAN Enterprise customer service suite for public sector organizations. The press release underlines three major additions as well as a number of enhancements. Read the rest of this entry »

Jive introduces new iPad, iPhone and Android apps to support the demands of mobile users to generate content and access communication and collaboration tools.

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Soffront Software Inc., launched version 10.0 of its customer relationship management (CRM) solution, with a complete technology upgrade to the latest version of Microsoft .NET, a renewed user interface, and support for easier integration with third-party applications. Read the rest of this entry »

Kronos Incorporated has announced improvements to Kronos Workforce Ready, its cloud solution for small to medium businesses (SMBs). To date, Kronos Workforce Ready offers functionality for the following SMB human capital management (HCM) requirements: Read the rest of this entry »

Salesforce.com will acquire the cloud marketing platform ExactTarget. The transaction was valued at approximately $2.5 billion. Salesforce plans to add ExactTarget’s digital marketing capabilities to its Marketing Cloud functionality and to expand its customer base with ExactTarget’s more than 6,000 customers (including Coca-Cola, Gap, and Nike).

To date, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud has been thriving on its previous acquisitions—Radian6 and Buddy Media—which focus on social marketing. With the new acquisition, Salesforce will be introducing digital marketing to its marketing offering. Read the rest of this entry »

Cornerstone OnDemand introduced a series of new features to its talent management suite. The intent is to address users’ mobility, social, and personalization needs such as bring your own device (BYOD) and bring your own application (BYOA).  Read the rest of this entry »

The language-technology provider Transparent Language Inc. announced that it would provide free technological support to those interested in under-resourced languages, with its 7000 Languages Project. Read the rest of this entry »

For talent management stakeholders conceptualizing onboarding is fun—welcoming a new member to a team, followed by the integration process, often signifies growth and new life for an organization. Consequently, most companies engage a great deal with the human capital management (HCM) functionality designed to support onboarding. By contrast, offboarding is oftentimes a cheerless process, as the loss of a trained and knowledgeable employee generally has a negative connotation, whether it means simply the loss of a skilled worker who will need to be replaced or the ill health of the company as a whole. Therefore, the offboarding process is habitually undertaken with low energy levels, leading as a natural result to the underutilization of the offboarding functionality available in most HCM systems.

Smart companies will invest in an HCM system with comprehensive onboarding and offboarding capabilities, and devote ample resources and time to ensure the offboarding process is smooth, while negative impacts are reduced and positive impacts maximized.

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The HR, payroll, and benefits administration services company Automatic Data Processing, simply known as ADP, introduced ADP Plan Health Review. The application is meant to help ADP Retirement Services clients measure the retirement readiness of their employees.

By using the Plan Health Review tool, sponsors may reveal the retirement readiness of their employees, as well as identify employee groups that require assistance with their planning. The solution includes a proprietary scoring system to measure participation rates, participant deferrals, participant investment usage, and participant usage of loans and withdrawals. Read the rest of this entry »

The educational technology company Coursera announced that it has begun working with 10 US state university systems and public schools to introduce new educational content to its massive open online courses (MOOCs) collection.

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Blackboard has announced the launch of TipTxt, a two-way free-of-charge texting service that allows students to confidentially notify school officials of activity related to bullying or school safety. The service can be made available to every public, private, and parochial K-12 school in the United States. Blackboard has invited the National Parent Teacher Association (National PTA) to reach out to its wide network of parents and teachers and promote the initiative. Read the rest of this entry »

 Talent management professionals may be interested in Peoplefluent’s announcement today revealing newly released features that support talent development, training programs, and effective employee communication.

The press release underlines a deeper integration between Peoplefluent Talent Management—performance management, career planning, leadership talent reviews, and succession planning—and Peoplefluent Learning Management. The two solutions were also enhanced with a Talent Management Development Plan, which allows users to add, register and launch content, view competency gaps and review messages from either solution.

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IBM has announced that IBM Watson will be put to work towards improving customer satisfaction, as part of its Smarter Commerce initiative.

The artificially intelligent computer is well known for its ability to win Jeopardy and for its advances in assisting medical institutions. More recently, IBM has decided to exploit Watson for its capacity to learn, adapt, and understand a company’s data rapidly. Customer relationship management is a perfect scenario for testing this ability.

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Internet company Yahoo! has entered into an agreement to acquire the Tumblr social blogging service. According to the official press release:

Per the agreement and our promise not to screw it up, Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business. David Karp will remain CEO. The product, service and brand will continue to be defined and developed separately with the same Tumblr irreverence, wit, and commitment to empower creators. 

Or, in other words, Tumblr can go on being Tumblr, if it’s not distracted by Yahoo! adds. Read the rest of this entry »