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.
See associated figure
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.
See associated figure
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.
See associated figure
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