The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is what is still the best album Bruce Springsteen ever did, containing his most inventive lyrics and most exuberant musicianship, shame it was his first — Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. He never quite recaptured the live wire excitement of that first album. Hey, some artists just peak early:

 

FW Stephens has announced that it has successfully migrated from its MYOB product to Advance practice management software from APS. In addition to Advance, FW Stephens implemented Advance CRM and Worksite Document Management software.

Company officials cited “strategic changes within the practice” involving “the restructuring of workflow practices” as reasons for the change.

 

“The practice had outgrown its previous system and we required a product that not only provided practice management methods but one that offered a suite of modules that addressed all the operational needs of the modern practice, including CRM and Document Management,” said Owen Skinner, Managing Partner for FW Stephens.

“The investment made in the APS platform — practice management, CRM, and document management software — ensures that, as a practice, we will no longer be required to review our systems after each significant growth cycle,” Skinner added.

The FW Stephens project saw Advance Practice Management, Advance Practice IQ, Advance CRM, Advance Vigilant and Worksite Document and E-mail Management modules implemented as an integrated enterprise product.

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CRM vendor RightNow Technologies, the pride of Bozeman, Montana, has introduced RightNow May ‘08, the latest version of its enterprise-class, on demand customer relationship management (CRM) product.

 

With new online chat capabilities, RightNow is offering what company officials characterize as “complete enterprise feedback management capabilities that cover customer contact points including phone, e-mail and Web, across service, marketing, and sales operations.”

 

RightNow May ‘08 also has multi-channel capabilities to capture the voice of the customer.

 

Customer feedback comes from satisfaction surveys conducted over the phone, via e-mail, on the Web, and now, with online chat. The product then gathers and unifies customer opinions and feedback. It can trigger a survey after an online chat interaction with a service agent, and feedback can be gathered from anonymous online consumers, such as someone who recently abandoned a shopping cart.

 

The product compiles results for trend analysis, and individual responses are included within customer profiles to enable future, more personalized service.

 

In its February ‘08 release, RightNow added topic monitoring capabilities that automate the review of customer sentiment by grouping or clustering common topics within unstructured text responses.

 

Last August, RightNow added emotion detection features to gauge customers’ opinions by applying an emotional rating to text-based customer communications.

 

Jim Davies, Research Director, CRM for Gartner, has said that “as customers are increasingly looking to engage with companies via multiple channels, vendors will need to respond by embedding multi-channel functionality into their products to support a

comprehensive feedback strategy.”

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InfoParc has announced the release AB-5-03-1 of the absoluteBUSY Web CRM software. Company officials say this upgrade includes “an improved sales module, enhanced tagging feature and improved compatibility with PHP-5, MySQL-5.”

 

The number of tags per line can now be configured on the fly, which allows a nice screen rendering also for large sets of freely defined tags. A Live Demo of the new release can be found on the Web site (www.absoluteBUSY.com).

 

AbsoluteBUSY is a Web-based CRM software for on-site installation — there is no hosted application. The software includes a smart contact manager, a task tracking module, a sales tracking module basic project tracking and reporting capabilities.

 

“Due to its simple architecture, absoluteBUSY is one of the fastest professional Web based CRM applications,” company officials say, adding that the system can either be installed on your company Internet/intranet server or at a Web hosting provider.

 

AbsoluteBUSY - Web CRM was first published in 2001. It’s described by company officials as “an application with a price range from €140 per user down to €60 per user, depending on the total number of seats. All fees are a one time payment, with no subscriptions and no recurring fees… AbsoluteBUSY is sold on a ‘try before you buy’ approach.”

 

It’s based on the open source software stack LAMP/WAMP (Apache Webserver, PHP scripting, MySQL database), available for all major server platforms, such as Unix, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, Windows, Mac OS X, and Novell 6.5.

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Cegedim and Skila have formed an alliance to co-market their products and services to medical and marketing teams in the life sciences industry.

 

The co-marketing alliance between Cegedim, a vendor of pharmaceutical CRM and healthcare industry data, and Skila, which sells integrated marketing and medical products, creates a suite of what officials of both firms call “knowledge and effectiveness products for global Medical and Marketing teams.”

 

The alliance seeks to meet what it sees as a growing need for pharmaceutical companies to “better understand their clients, streamline their global teams and business processes and ensure corporate transparency and internal medical and regulatory compliance,” Cegedim officials say.

 

The Skila products that will be co-marketed include iAdvocate, described by company officials as “technology and continuous services for building and managing relationships with thought leaders based on the exchange of actionable knowledge, need and collaboration,” and iLaunch, to help global launch teams centralize knowledge.

 

The Cegedim products that will be co-marketed include IcoMed, which measures physicians’ preferential attachment to products that they prescribe while evaluating the size and profile of their clientele, and OneKey, a healthcare professional database.

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IBM has reached an agreement with ERI Bancaire to offer additional services in the area of Consulting, Support, Application Management and Hosting Services based around the OLYMPIC Banking System.

Following the acquisition of Unicible assets in June 2007, IBM created a Banking Competence Center based in Lausanne. BCC is a partner for financial institutions in Switzerland as a product partner in Consulting, System Integration, Application Management and Hosting.

 

One of the features of the development strategy is to work closely with major banking product software vendors in Switzerland. The company offers a range of services in Portfolio Management, CRM, e-Banking and Risk & Compliance, as well as infrastructure services such as User Help Desk, Server Management and Monitoring.

IBM and ERI Bancaire S.A. have worked together since 1989. ERI Bancaire S.A. is developing the OLYMPIC Banking System based on IBM hardware and software.

 

The agreement was signed on April 1, 2008, and company officials see it fitting current markets needs for more end-to-end and integrated products.