The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is JibJab’s “This Land” parody from the last presidential election:
Bellevue, Washington-based Avidian Technologies has announced that it now provides support for Terminal Server and more advanced User Permissions in Prophet 3.0, its Outlook-based sales software.
Both features are available to existing customers as an update and will ship with all subsequent Prophet purchases.
These added features are designed to give companies using Prophet “greater control over their sales data and easier access for all users,” according to James Wong, CEO and co-founder of Avidian Technologies.
“This update to Prophet answers the call from our customers for an easy way to maintain better control and security over their sales data,” said Wong. “With support for Terminal Server we’ve broadened the options for accessing sales information.”
According to company officials, support for Terminal Server allows users access to their Prophet data through a Terminal Server session, providing ease of access and mobility, as users can access their Prophet data from any computer with the Terminal Server interface.
Terminal Server also permits installation from the central server, eliminating the need for IT to touch each computer.
User Permissions give companies the ability to create a hierarchy within Prophet so they can divide their customer information into teams, regions, territories, or any groupings they wish to create. Users see only the information they need to see and are able to share information with the right people.
Management can create sales reports for any group within the hierarchy such as a specific sales representative, team, region, or the company as a whole, providing a global view or a detailed look at performance and results.
Unlike traditional CRM or sales management software, company officials explain, Prophet is built into Outlook, “thereby eliminating the need to manage multiple contact databases or toggle between separate applications.”
Built on the .NET platform, Prophet works entirely inside Outlook and integrates with other critical business capabilities. This allows what company officials characterize as “management of contacts, companies, sales opportunities and all related communication and history inside the familiar Outlook interface.”
The Prophet Professional Server Edition and Prophet Enterprise Server Edition are available for sales teams of 5 or more, with prices starting at $299.95 per user for the Prophet Professional Server Edition.
AppExchange gets a few more: Centive, a vendor of on-demand sales compensation management has announced the availability of Centive Compel for salesforce.com's AppExchange.
Salesforce.com customers can now deploy Compel within their Salesforce implementation to provide an at-a-glance look at interactive dashboards that display a quick summary of key sales performance indicators with a single-click, drill-down capability.
Centive Compel is a fully-automated sales compensation management system delivered through an affordable, subscription-based service. Centive officials say it’s “easy to deploy, learn and use,” as “there is no software to purchase or install.”
Compel calculates accurate commissions and bonuses, provides sales representatives and managers with real-time visibility into attainment and performance data and offers finance executives a flexible system for modeling various compensation scenarios, and provides a complete audit trail of all changes made to plans and data as well as the security and process controls needed to support Sarbanes-Oxley compliance initiatives.
Scribe Software, a vendor of data migration and integration software technology for CRM and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, has announced the availability of Scribe's Integration product for Salesforce and Great Plains for salesforce.com's AppExchange.
Scribe's AppExchange Mobile-ready product for Salesforce and Great Plains will be part of a live keynote demonstration of new AppExchange partner applications hosted by Tony Perkins, founder and editor of Always On.
This real-time integration product provides integration between Salesforce and Great Plains. The product synchronizes customer, address, and product catalog records and enables users to convert opportunities to orders in Salesforce. Those orders are then immediately and automatically processed in Great Plains.
Once the order is placed, the product ensures complete customer visibility in Salesforce by providing real time updates of orders and invoices from Great Plains. Because the product is built on the Scribe Insight platform, customers can quickly tailor the product to their specific business requirements via the configuration workbench, all without writing a single line of code.
And Rally Software Development has announced that Rally is “one of the first AppExchange OEM Edition partners.”
AppExchange OEM Edition allows Rally to develop, market, and sell their Application Lifecycle Management products running on the AppExchange on-demand platform, direct to customers, without requiring end-users to subscribe to the Salesforce CRM application.
The announcement was made today at Appforce, salesforce.com's first annual AppExchange partner, user and developer conference.
Built on the AppExchange OEM Edition, Rally Agile Product Manager enables product managers and IT business analysts to plan and release a “continuous flow of software products and services based on customer feedback taken directly from salesforce.com and other customer relationship management (CRM) systems.”
Parature, vendor of on demand customer support software, has announced that the company is offering current Talisma customers free data migration and professional services set-up when switching to Parature’s customer support product.
The offer is targeted mainly at organizations seeking support software that can be customized to their specific needs, such as reporting, Parature officials say.
Parature officials say Talisma customers “would benefit from Parature’s highly customizable and easy-to-use customer service software that enables companies to configure the product to their specific business processes and workflows.” They claim “no technical skills are required for customization, so support administrators can adjust the software themselves instead of relying on their IT departments or a professional services team.”
Parature officials consider their reporting capabilities “a key differentiator for Parature,” as they say it “reaches across the entire product platform, enabling support personnel to create custom reports analyzing any information in the system using the simple drag-and-drop technology to choose parameters. Reports can be in raw data formats or in 15 different graphical formats, as well as exported with the click of a button to Microsoft Excel.”
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