By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music
is what some critics call the greatest rock album ever, Bob Dylan’s Live 1966, the old Royal Albert Hall
bootleg:
Microsoft CRM 3.0: Ten Things You Need To Know:
It’s still scheduled to be released at the end of this year.
2005. That’s a Microsoft PromiseTM, friends, so count on it as you
would any Microsoft PromiseTM.
The time and effort required to
integrate it with other apps, or create customized versions of the software for
your particular verticals will be shortened, Redmond says. Gee… thanks, guys.
(“Partners will be able to obtain
the necessary software development kit for CRM 3.0 through the Microsoft Developer
Network later this year,” according to ComputerWorld
Singapore.)
It’ll come in two modules, one for
automating the management of direct marketing campaigns, and one managing
personnel and resource scheduling.
Service Provider License
Agreements will let hosting partners pay as they go.
According to Barbara
Darrow there’s a Quick Campaign module “for sales staff who might need to
devise a fast plan of action for a call.”
(The main marketing stuff is for professional marketers, Brad
Wilson, general manager of Microsoft CRM says, with campaign planning and approvals.
“This is more for a sales guy who finds a prospect and wants to put something
together quickly, plan a golf outing and pull a list together.”)
It’ll be more tightly integrated
with Office and Outlook than Microsoft had let on before – it’ll look quite a
lot like Outlook, actually.
A new synchronization feature will let users update only
what they want. “If you’re a regional manager, you may not need all of the
objects in the system to sync but just those that have to do with your region
and accounts,” Wilson said.
It will offer a Small Business Edition “optimized for easy
installations and to run with Microsoft Small Business Server 2003,” Darrow
says.
It’ll be available as either a
purchase or as a hosted application, a la salesforce.com.
(Company officials claim Microsoft currently
offers hosted CRM, although careful scrutiny has failed to find any actual
customers using it.)
(Which means the price of hosted
Microsoft CRM on places such as NaviSite, currently about $99 a month, will
come down, presumably to something in salesforce.com’s $65 a month range.)
It’ll be called 3.0, even though the current product is 1.2,
which came out in December 2003 because, as Wilson said, “A lot of what our partners had asked for were things that
were already in our 3.0 road map,”
(Which means yes, Microsoft really
does ration out improvements and upgrades on marketing-dictated schedules
instead of putting out the best technology they can at the time – “Hey, that’s
cool. Save it for the 2007 upgrade.”)
(But you already knew that.)
…
French VoIP system supplier NetCentrex, which sells voice-video-data
networks and next-generation services, is announcing that Tiscali Italia, which bills
itself as “the Internet Communications Company,” is delivering residential broadband IP telephony services based on NetCentrex’
MyCall product as part of the European partnership between NetCentrex and
Tiscali S.p.A.
The new Tiscali Voce integrated offer combines telephony and
Internet services in a single package and is available to all Tiscali ADSL
subscribers. Subscribers can choose between two types of monthly subscriptions
and one pay-as-you go tariff plan.
Olivier Hersent, Chairman and CTO of NetCentrex said the
deployment of NetCentrex’ MyCall residential solution “enables Tiscali to
deliver voice with the quality level of a normal ISDN line.”
NetCentrex is gunning for what it sees as the adoption of
the IP multimedia subsystem fixed/mobile convergence architecture, “but
believes it will be a number of years yet before full IMS capabilities are in
commercial use,” according to Light Reading.
“NetCentrex, which provides softswitch and IP applications
server (Centrex) technology to more than 40 European service providers, is
developing its IMS capabilities now, with a view to introducing some elements
in the coming months,” Light Reading
reports.
“Mobile 3G, or UMTS, networks won’t be fully IP until after
2010, so IMS won’t be real until after that time. What we’re seeing at the
moment will become a reality in about five years’ time,” Hersent says.
The Tiscali-NetCentrex partnership is a triple play deal. MyCall
can take voice and video apps over 3G and broadband networks and allow consumer
fixed-mobile roaming and fixed-mobile convergent services. Video apps include
video mail and video conferencing. Tiscali likes MyCall because it can provide
value-added IP telephony services immediately, and position itself for future
additions of video and fixed/mobile services.
NetCentrex is partnering with Envivio, a provider of MPEG-4
and H.264 broadcast and streaming products and Highdeal, a pricing, high
performance rating and settlement products vendor in the formation of the
IPlay3 consortium, which wants to deliver best of breed residential triple play
solution to the Americas market.
…
Also in Italy – sounds like a full-time resident
correspondent’s needed in Northern Italy, doesn’t it? First CoffeeSM
would bravely volunteer – Webraska is announcing the launch in Italy of Vodafone Navigator, a branded GPS
navigation service for smartphones and wireless PDAs.
Powered by Webraska’s SmartZone Navigation and SmartZone
Geospatial Platform, Vodafone Navigator features pan-European map data
coverage, integration of dynamic point-of-interest data and real-time traffic
information.
Vodafone Navigator “All-in-one” packs targeting the consumer
retail market are priced at EUR 199 (just north of 200 bucks), comprising the
navigation software, a Bluetooth GPS receiver, a universal car cradle, as well
as one year subscription to the service. Subscription to the service from year
2 is EUR 59 per year.
Vodafone Navigator offers traffic information and alerts for
“traffic-optimized routes,” restaurants searchable by cuisine specialty or
opening hours and visually located on the map and pedestrian navigation with
street routing and mapping, either using GPS real time positioning or walk
speed simulation.
The navigation software is compatible with the following
operating systems: Symbian Series 60, Symbian UIQ and Microsoft Windows Mobile
for Pocket PC.
…
First CoffeeSM’s favorite
news item in quite a while:
“A young Russian man who dressed in women’s
clothes to take an exam for his sister was caught after his oversize bust gave him away, Interfax reported.
“The youth’s ‘unusually prominent female features,’ and
heavy make-up drew security guards’ attention and they stopped him from taking
the test, Yasen Zasursky, dean of Moscow State University’s journalism faculty,
told the agency.”
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/
for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored
content. This means yours, too.
