New Product Spotlight: April 23

Microsoft Business Solutions this week released Microsoft Business Solutions-Great Plains 7.5. The company says the new release promotes a collaborative approach to information management. Great Plains 7.5 is designed to improve efficiency and profitability and respond more rapidly to customer demand. Updates include better tools that address real-world challenges in the areas of financials, supply-chain management, project management and analytics, the company says. 5by5 Networks is the latest vendor to partner with Microsoft to offer enhanced MS CRM capabilities. The company says it will integrate its call center solutions into MS CRM, offering companies greater combined flexibility. In addition, the integration of Web services into the combined solution will enable companies to access and use silos of customer data previously thought unusable, for example pools of customer data acquired through a merger, 5by5 says. Apropos has released Version 6.0 of the Apropos Multi-Channel Interaction Management Suite. This latest version is designed to help integrate multichannel interaction management across an enterprise's business operations. The new Version 6.0 architecture offers partners and customers an application platform that can be customized to monitor, prioritize, and report on all types of business interactions. Expertcity has released the latest version of its DesktopStreaming product for call centers. Designed to accommodate remote problem solving, administration, support, training, and issue resolution, DesktopStreaming 4.0 provides support tools that integrate into business processes to optimize traditional phone-based and Web-based support transactions. The company says the new product has enhanced chat and session transfer features, in addition to several other upgrades and additions. TechExcel this week announced that all of its CRM products are now fully supporting the MySQL database platform. The company says that it is one of the first CRM solutions to support an open source database. ServiceWare Technologies, a provider of Web-based knowledge management solutions for customer service and support, has announced the availability of ServiceWare Knowledge Portal .NET edition. The company says ServiceWare Knowledge Portal provides a flexible portal platform, allowing organizations to rapidly deploy intranet, extranet, and Internet portal solutions. ServiceWare's portal product includes a rich set of features for development, deployment, administration, and end-user adoption of the portal. The .NET edition allows for easier integration of content and applications into the portal, the company says. Firstlogic has released the latest version of its Information Quality Suite (IQ Suite), the company's data quality software solution. The latest IQ Suite offers robust support of multibyte and Unicode character sets and is particularly suited to global organizations implementing technologies such as business intelligence, CRM, or ERP applications. Firstlogic says. The company also says the suite can process data in almost all types of character sets, thus giving companies the opportunity to better understand its customer interactions around the world all from a single source.