Business Applications - 29 Aug 2006

CRM Software. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions let organizations capture information surrounding customer interactions and integrate it with all customer-related functions to help maintain customer relationships. Salesforce.com's Salesforce CRM solution beat the competition by a wide margin to take the award for top CRM software for the second year in a row. Salesforce is a hosted suite of CRM solutions that includes sales force automation (SFA), customer service and support, marketing automation, customer analytics, document management, and custom applications. Salesforce is easy to deploy and use, and because it's a Webbased application, it doesn't require an expensive upfront software purchase.

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ERP Software. For the second year in a row, Epicor Software's Epicor Enterprise is bringing home the award for best ERP solution. Epicor Enterprise is a suite of products that includes customer relationship management (CRM), accounting, distribution, and warehousemanagement functionality. Epicor Enterprise integrates and automates operational resources and business practices to help reduce costs and inventory requirements, improve job tracking and customer service, and promote rapid ROI and low total cost of ownership (TCO). The Epicor Enterprise suite is designed for use with Microsoft SQL Server, which allows the application to scale to hundreds of users across multiple sites.

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Document Management/Imaging Software. Document management systems are becoming an essential part of the modern enterprise's collaborative work environment, and according to Windows IT Pro readers, Microsoft's Window SharePoint Services is the leading technology in this space. SharePoint Services is a Web-based collaboration solution that lets users and workgroups across organizations create, modify, and share documents such as spreadsheets, presentations, letters, memos, whitepapers, and images. The technology ships as part of Windows Server 2003 R2 or is available as a free download. It integrates with Windows Office applications and helps organizations improve business process efficiency, increase employee productivity, and reduce operations costs. IT departments can use Windows SharePoint Services as a development platform to build customized collaborative applications for their organizations.

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