A couple of weeks ago, we started a series of blog posts product lifecycle management (PLM) about how TEC defines different types of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and what sets them apart. We will continue with a detailed description of process manufacturing ERP, and we will introduce some of the top-rated vendors in this domain. Read the rest of this entry »

If you know nothing about a company, you should be able to figure out the bare essentials by visiting its About Us page, right?

Turns out this is only true sometimes.

When visiting the Digg website, for example. The first line on Digg’s About page is this: “Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web.”

Neat, huh? One click and sixteen words after visiting the site, you know, in a nutshell, what they do. Read another fifty or so words and you’ll find out that content is displayed and ranked based on votes from users. Go further and you’ll find out how that works. The information is there, and it’s not hard to find.

Enterprise software vendors, by contrast, don’t always provide such clear information so concisely. To show you what I mean, I looked at the About Us pages of the ten vendors listed in The New and the Noteworthy: 2008 Vendor Wrap-up, published late last year on this blog.

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Part 3 of this blog series analyzed the ever-evolving user interface (UI) and visualization technologies, and related approaches of Microsoft and other independent software vendors (ISVs). Lawson Smart Office and IFS’ Project Aurora (including the first Project’s delivery, IFS Enterprise Explorer [IEE]) were described.

Shedding Some “Northern Star” Light on IEE

For IEE IFS uses Microsoft ClickOnce, which is a technology designed to perform web-based deployment of rich applications. Basically the authorized user clicks on a link and the application loads straight from the web server without needing to be installed and distributed via CDs (like traditional client/server applications). It works similar to the counterpart Java Web Start or Adobe Flash technologies. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 2 of this blog series analyzed Microsoft platform parts that are slated for shared use within the Microsoft Dynamics family of products. Particular attention was given to Microsoft SQL Server, SharePoint, and parts of Microsoft .NET Framework.

What About Visualization and User Interface (UI) Technologies?

However, what has somewhat intrigued me is Microsoft’s not-so-vocal touting and promoting of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), although it is an intrinsic part of the .NET Framework. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, the tool has not yet been used within the Dynamics set in earnest, although Lawson Software  and Verticent would be the two independent software vendors (ISV) that I am aware of deploying it. Read the rest of this entry »

Part I of this blog post introduced the common software deployment models and Consona CRM’s approach in that regard. To the end of enabling Total Customer Management (TCM) via an adaptive CRM offering, Consona CRM is built with a superior core infrastructure (customer data model, BPM, BI, SOA) and a holistic, best-of-breed product portfolio.

Consona claims to be one of the market’s rare CRM offerings that is both operational and collaborative, with many years of a broad range of consulting, technical, and business process services that have created the related methodology and blueprint.

Consona CRM Portfolio

The vendor believes that it offers the best value for price in the market due to the extensive product’s flexibility and adaptability, ease of customization, configuration, integration and upgrades, and due to the depth of the product’s extensibility.

These capabilities come from the combination of Onyx Adaptive CRM (i.e., BPM, BI, SFA, customer service, customer data management and customer data integration [CDI]), KNOVA (i.e., self-service and knowledge management [KM]) and the partnership with Million Handshakes (part of Portrait Software) for marketing automation. Read the rest of this entry »

The launch of TEC’s blog has somewhat coincided with my visit to Belgrade, Serbia (what used to be Yugoslavia and then Serbia & Montenegro) for personal reasons. Those several days spent in my homeland in late October/early November (whereby I missed my beloved Boston Red Sox’ winning the MLB World Series ’07 Championship, darn it!) I at least used this time to also learn about the enterprise applications market in that region, and maybe even in the entire Balkan region. I have never seen any such market report from any other analyst house about this (possibly obscure) region, and I thought this topic might be of interest to our (curious) readers as well as to me. To be fair, I’ve seen other similar trip reports, such as this recent one about the Australian enterprise applications market. Read the rest of this entry »