New Product Spotlight

Salesforce.com announced today that its product now offers tight integration with Microsoft Outlook, without the need for an MS Exchange server. Sales and customer service personnel can more easily send and receive email messages through Outlook and log relevant messages in Salesforce.com through familiar Outlook controls to ensure a complete, 360-degree customer view, the company claims. Best Software today announced an update to ACT! for Palm OS, its contact management application designed specifically for the Palm OS platform. The free update includes Palm OS 5 support for the newest handhelds, including the popular Palm Tungsten device, telephony features that allow customers with Palm OS smartphones to dial directly from an ACT! contact record, and significantly increased database performance, according to Best. SupportSoft, a provider of service and support tools, announced a new release of its Knowledge Center product. This knowledge automation software release delivers more useful and relevant self-service answers for end users, more targeted use of knowledge in assisted-service by help desk analysts or customer service representatives, and more efficient and effective authoring and workflow capabilities for knowledge authors, the company says. The new features are also designed to help shorten help desk or customer service calls, or eliminate them altogether to speed up time to resolution for end users. Everypath has announced a new solution called mobile task automation (MTA). Using MTA a user can select specific parts of a complete CRM suite to place on their mobile device, rather than shrinking the entire solution. "Everypath MTA delivers a streamlined user interface, structured process flows, and smart connector technology to extend logic from existing applications to handheld devices," Mark Tapling, CEO and president of Everypath, said in a statement. "The product is designed to deliver high-impact business applications for use by sales, service, and order management related mobile workers." PRODUCT4, a provider of bank branch automation products and services, recently announced the availability of a new product that allows bank personnel to view the total relationship of a customer in a real-time environment. Dubbed PRODUCT4 Snapshot, the company says the system provides a centralized display of a customer's entire relationship with the institution, including host and third-party data. In addition, with its customer strategy profile feature, a customer service representative is provided with a specific set of guidance information that can be used for cross-selling and up-selling opportunities, the company says.