Zoho has announced the Zoho CRM Document Library—an application that allows sales teams to share sales collateral, materials, proposals, and other relevant material. The tool is integrated with Zoho CRM, allowing users to access documents from within Zoho while avoiding the use of external document management systems such as Zoho Docs or Google docs. Read the rest of this entry »

TEC analysts speculate about developments to come in a variety of enterprise software spaces in the year ahead. (See also P.J. Jakovljevic’s sneak peek at 2013 and Bob Eastman’s look at what’s in store for supply chain.)

Josh Chalifour, Director of Knowledge Services, on enterprise information management:
Across the enterprise software market, cloud-based delivery models are a vector of concern. Demand however has been slow to pick up for these models in enterprise information management spaces. Between 2010 and 2011, we saw demand hover at just over 20 percent of the inquiries we receive from end-user organizations. In 2012 demand moved incrementally higher, to about 26%. Read the rest of this entry »

Woe is HP. The company recently made headlines with news that its Autonomy division, which sells a number of products for enterprise content management (ECM), search and discovery, customer experience management, and more, misrepresented its financial situation to get itself acquired by HP. Indeed, HP says its pain from this misreprentation comes to about $5 billion (USD). Read the rest of this entry »

Laserfiche recently implemented its enterprise content managment (ECM) solution for Oregon’s Jackson County. Like many public sector organizations, Jackson County has to adhere to strict records retention schedules. County employees with varied roles must access these records for different purposes, and thus they need distinct views to find, filter, and access the records according to their role requirements.

A new case study explains how Jackson County dealt with these issues using its Laserfiche ECM solution. Laserfiche supports the county’s processes from scanning, to organizing the records in its repository, to disposition.

TEC is preparing to publish more detailed information and reports on Laserfiche in the near future. In the meantime, you can find out more in our IT Showcase or you can evaluate ECM solutions in TEC Advisor.

Nuxeo sees its content management product as the base for organizations to create their own content-centric business applications. The company offers some interesting tools to aid in this process, which I’ll get to in a moment. Nuxeo also offers its own distinct modules for document management, case management, digital asset management, and with the recent version 5.5, for social collaboration. Read the rest of this entry »

Hannon Hill has grown its content management application over the years so that today’s solution targets midsized organizations with a depth of functionality at an accommodating price point. Hannon Hill’s Cascade Server is frequently adopted within higher-education institutions (roughly 80 percent of its clients) but Hannon Hill has also maintained a focus on the public sector, health care, technology, and publishing industries. Read the rest of this entry »

That membrane between your business and the online world—your Web site—is expected to be so permeable and malleable these days that web content management (WCM) systems have to manage a lot more than just the content on your site. Now web experience management (WEM) has emerged to address the way people access and interact with your site. WEM also illuminates more of these interactions for your own business’s marketing edification. In this blog post, I’ll look into what WEM means and how it fits within the backdrop of WCM functionality. Read the rest of this entry »

Learning management systems (LMSs) and Web content management (WCM) systems for corporate or educational environments have a new but not untested contender. Trunity (a combination of the words truth, trust, and community) provides a platform used to collaborate on delivering a significant body of research used by educational institutions. It may be worth a further look and that’s what we at TEC, intend to do shortly. Read the rest of this entry »

In Part 1 of this blog series I admitted to being a late adopter of a sort, in part for not immediately jumping onto the social media bandwagon. In particular, my initial reaction to Salesforce Chatter (a.k.a. Collaboration Cloud) was tepid when it was introduced at the Dreamforce 2009 conference.

However, a few months have passed and this period has helped salesforce.com craft the much clearer cloud computing evolution message that was analyzed in Part 2. The article then also went on to explain my change of heart and discussed Salesforce Chatter’s current state of affairs (in terms of the current number of beta users and third-party solutions).

Salesforce Chatter became generally available (GA) as of June 22, 2010. Salesforce.com is even entertaining the idea that Chatter could be a general enterprise platform on its own. One Chatter-based application was recently announced by FinancialForce.com and is called Chatterbox.

Chatterbox comes within the FinancialForce Accounting product but the idea is to also sell it to accounting departments as standalone. For more information on the product, see the company’s press release (PR), a related blog post from WebCPA, and the product’s dedicated Web page.

The final part of this blog series will explain many design principles and possible use of Chatter and Chatterbox from my dialogue with Jeremy Roche, FinancialForce.com CEO and President, and UNIT4 CODA chairman.

Read the rest of this entry »

In Part 1 of this blog series I admitted to being a late adopter of a sort, in part for not immediately jumping onto the social media bandwagon. In particular, my initial reaction to Salesforce Chatter (a.k.a. Collaboration Cloud) was tepid. To be frank, Marc Benioff, salesforce.com’s flamboyant and engaging CEO, gave an atypically incoherent and dry keynote speech when he introduced Chatter at the Dreamforce 2009 conference.

However, a few months have passed and this period has helped salesforce.com craft a much clearer message. In addition, Chatter has reportedly been used within salesforce.com’s own organization (as the largest beta site/tester), which has given the vendor much more time and experience to improve and tweak the product.

Read the rest of this entry »

Let me start this blog series with one disclaimer: I am not an early adopter and I do not easily fall for any vendor’s slick marketing. At a recent large user conference, a vendor’s staffer asked me why I wasn’t already using an iPad tablet computer.

That question cracked me up, since I still use an Apple’s discontinued iBook notebook (besides the fact that I might only start using the latest tablet bestseller when it begins to feature computer multi-tasking, an USB flash drive port, and a CD/DVD drive). My laptop computer seems quite ancient now, but it still works and seems indestructible like a Volkswagen Beetle, in spite of all the abuses it has endured at airports, airplanes, and cafes for years.

With all this personal background laid out, I now have to admit that for all these years I have also cast a skeptical eye on Salesforce.com. Sure, the company has been growing admirably for all that time while even achieving modest profits, but I have also been aware of it constantly announcing (i.e., creating buzz about) new concepts and products well before they were generally available (GA). Salesforce.com would then have to actually deliver on these products’ hyped promises, which would be another opportunity for buzz creation (in a “we told you so” manner).

Read the rest of this entry »

The business process management (BPM) market is sizzling hot, with Gartner Dataquest estimating its compound annual growth rate (CAGR) at 13 percent in 2009. In fact, almost all leading BPM vendors have been buzzing about their unprecedented growth and profitability, especially amidst the ongoing economic drought.

It is truly difficult to argue against the need for companies from all walks of life to improve their business processes. Doing “better, faster, and cheaper” is the “slogan du jour.” Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series outlined Oracle’s recent (and seemingly genuine) change of heart and approach towards partnering. The analysis then moved into Oracle’s VAD Remarketer Program, which was launched about two years ago to allow partners to determine the best growth path for their business.

A Remarketer is a new class of Oracle reseller with the ability to resell only the products that fall under Oracle’s 1-Click Ordering Programs and strictly under standard terms and conditions. The current figures show over 1,200 recruited Remarketers with over 2,000 placed orders since the launch. Read the rest of this entry »