CRM and Cloud Technology Blog

For Salesforce CRM users, the Summer '12 Release brings a crop of highly anticipated changes and updates, including Chatter Messenger, the introduction of Rypple, and Salesforce Touch (Beta version) for iPad, just to name a few.

According to Forrester's US Tech Market Outlook For 2012 report, the Manufacturing sector will be one of the top three industries that dominate software purchases this year. Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms offer a valuable opportunity for one of the United States' major economic pillars to expand sales and influence through accurate data tracking, management, forecasting and accessibility.

Leads and Opportunities are two very important objects to track within your Salesforce CRM system. However, often times the terminology can be a hang-up because what is the real difference between a Lead and an Opportunity, when they both sound like ways to earn new business?

Headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska, Orion Advisor Services, LLC is a Portfolio Accounting Service Bureau that assists financial advisors with a comprehensive back-office system that combines service bureau with portfolio management.

In technology world terms, Doextra has been around for eons (13.5 years to be exact). During that time we have worked with operations, sales and IT teams at a number of Midwest Financial Services companies ranging from small brokerage groups to large insurance providers.

Last night over 625 people descended on Vet's Memorial Auditorium, downtown Des Moines, for the 7th annual Prometheus Awards. Hosted by the Technology Association of Iowa, the awards celebration feted a year of accomplishments and growth in Iowa's tech industry. The Doextra team sponsored a table and enjoyed an evening of catching up with old friends and colleagues. We are so happy that Salesforce Consultant, Terry Miller, as well as Travis Rychnovsky and Josh Van Heukelom from Orchestrate, LLC, could join us for the big night.

Here at the office, we're big fans of Dropbox. As a perinially useful cloud service/application, you can share and automatically sync files across multiple devices. Therefore, you never have to email yourself documents or slog through correspondances to try to locate a file in a timely manner.

Last week, I did some spring cleaning on doextra.com in an effort to update new whitepapers and product fact sheets, as well as help you and other website visitors find information faster. Part of this spring cleaning was creating an Online Resource Center. This dedicated page on Doextra's website has fast and organized links to downloads, case studies, product information and expert blogs.

With the release of Salesforce's Spring '12 features, Chatter gets socially smarter with more advanced bookmarking and search features. In addition, Chatter users can take advantage of Customer Invitations, a free and unlimited invitation system (much in line with social network invitations on other platforms) that helps you sign up customers, prospects and partners that you want to collaborate with. The good news is that Customer Invitations are available through Dreamforce 2012 (September 18-21, 2012), and the Chatter accounts will remain intact and accessible even after the conference.

What is the new concept of "social enterprise"?

Salesforce.com recently trademarked the term "The Social Enterprise," which takes the popular concept of social entrepreneurship and applies it to the rapidly growing ecosystem of online communications channels, using the term to describe its different cloud platforms as a circular framework for engaging with co-workers and customers like never before. From a broad, macro-level perspective, a social enterprise is a competitive ecosystem with multiple channels all vying for dominance for millions of users' time, attention and participation (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, etc.). On a micro-level, social enterprises are a group of channels driven by a specific entity whether it be a company or individual (e.g., Comcast, Toyota, etc.).