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Customer service concerns the priority an organization assigns to customer service relative to components such as product innovation and pricing. In this sense, an organization that values good customer service may spend more money in training employees than the average organization or may proactively interview customers for feedback.\r\nA <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">customer support</span> is a range of customer services to assist customers in making cost effective and correct use of a product. It includes assistance in planning, installation, training, trouble shooting, maintenance, upgrading, and disposal of a product. These services even may be done at customer's side where he/she uses the product or service. In this case it is called &quot;at home customer services&quot; or &quot;at home customer support.&quot;\r\nRegarding technology, products such as mobile phones, televisions, computers, software products or other electronic or mechanical goods, it is termed technical support. \r\nCustomer service may be provided by a person (e.g., sales and service representative), or by automated means, such as kiosks, Internet sites, and apps.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">CRM </span>(Customer Relationship Management) is an approach to manage a company's interaction with current and potential customers. It uses data analysis about customers' history with a company to improve business relationships with customers, specifically focusing on customer retention and ultimately driving sales growth.\r\nOne important aspect of the CRM approach is the systems of CRM that compile data from a range of different communication channels, including a company's website, telephone, email, live chat, marketing materials and more recently, social media. Through the CRM approach and the systems used to facilitate it, businesses learn more about their target audiences and how to best cater to their needs.\r\nCRM helps users focus on their organization’s relationships with individual people including customers, service users, colleagues, or suppliers.\r\nWhen people talk about customer relationship management system, they might mean any of three things: \r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">CRM as Technology</span>: This is a technology product, often in the cloud, that teams use to record, report and analyse interactions between the company and users. This is also called a CRM system or solution.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">CRM as a Strategy</span>: This is a business’ philosophy about how relationships with customers and potential customers should be managed.&nbsp; </li><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">CRM as a Process</span>: Think of this as a system a business adopts to nurture and manage those relationships.</li></ul>\r\n<br /><br /><br />","materialsDescription":"<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal;\">Why is CRM important?</span></h1>\r\nCRM management system enables a business to deepen its relationships with customers, service users, colleagues, partners and suppliers.\r\nForging good relationships and keeping track of prospects and customers is crucial for customer acquisition and retention, which is at the heart of a CRM’s function. You can see everything in one place — a simple, customizable dashboard that can tell you a customer’s previous history with you, the status of their orders, any outstanding customer service issues, and more.\r\nGartner predicts that by 2021, CRM technology will be the single largest revenue area of spending in enterprise software. If your business is going to last, you know that you need a strategy for the future. For forward-thinking businesses, CRM is the framework for that strategy.\r\n<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal;\">What are the benefits of CRM?</span></h1>\r\nBy collecting and organising data about customer interactions, making it accessible and actionable for all, and facilitating analysis of that data, CRM offers many benefits and advantages.<br />The benefits and advantages of CRM include:\r\n<ul><li>Enhanced contact management</li><li>Cross-team collaboration</li><li>Heightened productivity</li><li>Empowered sales management</li><li>Accurate sales forecasting</li><li>Reliable reporting</li><li>Improved sales metrics</li><li>Increased customer satisfaction and retention</li><li>Boosted marketing ROI</li><li>Enriched products and services</li></ul>\r\n<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal;\">What are the key features of most popular CRM software programs?</span></h1>\r\nWhile many CRM solutions differ in their specific value propositions — depending on your business size, priority function, or industry type — they usually share some core features. These, in fact, are the foundation of any top CRM software, without which you might end up using an inferior app or an over-rated address book. So, let’s discuss the key features you need to look for when figuring out the best CRM software for your business.\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Contact management</span>. The best CRM solutions aren’t just an address book that only organizes contact details. It manages customer data in a centralized place and gives you a 360-degree view of your customers. You should be able to organize customers’ personal information, demographics, interactions, and transactions in ways that are meaningful to your goals or processes. Moreover, a good contact management feature lets you personalize your outreach campaign. By collecting personal, social, and purchase data, it will help you to segment target audience groups in different ways.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Reporting and dashboards</span>. These features of customer relationship management allow you to use analytics to interpret customer data. Reporting is very useful if you want to consolidate disparate data and churn out insights in different visualizations. This lets you make better decisions or proactively deal with market trends and customer behavioral patterns. The more visual widgets a CRM software has, the better you can present reports. Furthermore, a best customer relationship management software will generate real-time data, making reporting more accurate and timely. Reporting also keeps you tab on sales opportunities like upsell, resell, and cross-sell, especially when integrated with e-commerce platforms.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Lead management</span>. These features let you manage leads all the way to win-loss stage. They pave a clear path to conversion, so you can quickly assess how the business is performing. One of the main three legs that comprises the best client relationship management software (the other two being contact management and reporting), lead management unburdens the sales team from follow-ups, tracking, and repetitive tasks.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Deals and tasks</span>. Deals and tasks are closely associated with leads. Deals are leads at the negotiation stage, so it’s critical to keep a close eye on their associated tasks for a higher chance of conversion.<br />CRM software tools should also let you track both deals and tasks in their respective windows or across the sales stages. Whether you’re viewing a contact or analyzing the sales pipeline, you should be able to immediately check the deal’s tasks and details. Deals and tasks should also have user permissions to protect leaks of sensitive data. Similarly, alerts are critical to tasks so deadlines are met. Notifications are usually sent via email or prominently displayed on the user’s dashboard.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Campaign management</span>. Solid CRM software will integrate this feature to enable marketing processes from outreach concept to A/B testing to deployment and to post analysis. This will allow you to sort campaigns to target segments in your contacts and define deployment strategies. You will also be able to define metrics for various channels, then plow back the insights generated by post-campaign analytics into planning more campaigns.<br />Recurring outreach efforts can also be automated. For instance, you can set to instantly appropriate content to contacts based on their interest or send tiered autoresponders based on campaign feedback.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Email management</span>. By integrating with popular email clients like Gmail and Outlook, CRM solutions can capture email messages and sort important details that can be saved in contacts or synced with leads. They can also track activities like opened emails, forwarded emails, clicked links, and downloaded files. Emails can also be qualified for prospecting.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Social media management. </span>Popular CRM systems feature an integrated social media management where you can view different social media pages from the CRM’s interface. This is a convenient way to post, reply on, and manage all your pages. Likewise, this feature gives you a better perspective on how customers are interacting with your brand. A glean of their likes and dislikes, interests, shares, and public conversations helps you to assess customer biases and preferences. Customers are also increasingly using social media to contact companies; hence, a good CRM should alert you for brand mentions.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Mobile access</span>. With more users accessing apps via mobile devices, many vendors have been prioritizing mobile-first platforms. Emergence Capital Partners study found over 300 mobile-first apps so far and CRM is definitely one their targets. Many CRM solutions have both Android and iOS apps. Mobile access works in two ways to be highly appreciated: accessing data and inputting data while on location. Field sales with the latest sales information on hand may be able to interest prospects better. Conversely, sales reps can quickly update deals across the pipeline even as they come off a client meeting.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/CRM_-_Customer_Relationship_Management.png","alias":"crm-customer-relationship-management"},"337":{"id":337,"title":"Sales","description":" Sales are activities related to selling or the number of goods or services sold in a given targeted time period.\r\nThe seller, or the provider of the goods or services, completes a sale in response to an acquisition, appropriation, requisition, or a direct interaction with the buyer at the point of sale. There is a passing of title (property or ownership) of the item, and the settlement of a price, in which agreement is reached on a price for which transfer of ownership of the item will occur. The seller, not the purchaser, typically executes the sale and it may be completed prior to the obligation of payment. In the case of indirect interaction, a person who sells goods or service on behalf of the owner is known as a salesman or saleswoman or salesperson, but this often refers to someone selling goods in a store/shop, in which case other terms are also common, including salesclerk, shop assistant, and retail clerk.\r\nIn common law countries, sales are governed generally by the common law and commercial codes. In the United States, the laws governing sales of goods are somewhat uniform to the extent that most jurisdictions have adopted Article 2 of the Uniform Commercial Code, albeit with some non-uniform variations.\r\nA person or organization expressing an interest in acquiring the offered item of value is referred to as a potential buyer, prospective customer, or prospect. Buying and selling are understood to be two sides of the same &quot;coin&quot; or transaction. Both seller and buyer engage in a process of negotiation to consummate the exchange of values. The exchange, or selling, process has implied rules and identifiable stages. It is implied that the selling process will proceed fairly and ethically so that the parties end up nearly equally rewarded. The stages of selling, and buying, involve getting acquainted, assessing each party's need for the other's item of value, and determining if the values to be exchanged are equivalent or nearly so, or, in buyer's terms, &quot;worth the price&quot;. Sometimes, sellers have to use their own experiences when selling products with appropriate discounts.\r\nAlthough the skills required are different, from a management viewpoint, sales is a part of marketing. Sales often form a separate grouping in a corporate structure, employing separate specialist operatives known as salespersons (singular: salesperson). Selling is considered by many to be a sort of persuading &quot;art&quot;. Contrary to popular belief, the methodological approach of selling refers to a systematic process of repetitive and measurable milestones, by which a salesman relates his or her offering of a product or service in return enabling the buyer to achieve their goal in an economic way.","materialsDescription":" <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What's the Difference Between Sales and Marketing?</span>\r\nSales and Marketing: two terms we often hear together when working with mid-size companies. In some ways, this is logical because the two need to work together. But in fact, Sales and Marketing are two very different functions and require very different skills.\r\nBusiness leaders know what Operations are; they make stuff. They know what Accounting is; they record and control the money. And they know what Sales do; they sell stuff. So if you are not making stuff, selling stuff, or recording the money—what is marketing and why do you need it?\r\nWhat's the difference between Sales and Marketing? To answer this question, let's define what Sales and Marketing are separately and how they support one another.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic;\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What is Marketing? Aligning with Customers, Now and for the Future</span></span>\r\nA key job of Marketing is to understand the marketplace from the perspective of the customer looking back towards the company and helping lead the company where it should be in the future. Marketing’s job is to direct the organization toward the segments, or groups of customers and channels where the company can profitably compete. It should help the organization see how it needs to modify its product offerings, pricing, and communication so that it meets the needs of the distribution channel or end customers.\r\nMarketing also needs to convert the market understanding into tools and tactics to attract the market, build (often digital) relationships, and develop leads. Without Sales, Marketing efforts run short. Marketing directs Sales as to where they should be hunting and what ammo to use. Note, however, that if Marketing becomes a sales support function focused only on the now, the future can become lost.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic;\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Without Marketing, Sales Suffers</span></span>\r\nNot even the best hunter can bring home dinner if they are shooting blanks at decoys. Markets are constantly changing. The job of marketing is to stay ahead of the changes and help the hunters see where they should be hunting and provide them with the right ammunition. If Marketing is only focused on delivering the ammunition for today, nobody will see where the industry is moving or where the company needs to hunt next. This limits growth not only for Sales and Marketing but also for your entire organization.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic;\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Can You be Both Sales and Marketing?</span></span>\r\nIn all my years, working for companies that ranged from Fortune 100 to mid-size companies I have never met anyone who was really good at both sales and marketing. I have held the title of VP of Sales and Marketing, managing a 500 person sales and merchandising force. I was really a marketing person with sales authority. The skills required to focus on the now and the push of sales are different. In many ways, they are contrary to the skills of looking to the future and the customer perspective of marketing.\r\nEvery Sales organization feels they have a good understanding of their customers. But every Sales conversation with a customer has a sales transaction lurking in the background. Therefore, customers can never be completely open about their needs and want when talking to a sales person.\r\nFor a company to really grow, someone must have the job of looking out the window towards where the company needs to go in the future. For many companies, this is the job of the CEO and Sales hires someone to do some sales support and gives them a marketing title. But as companies grow, the job of CEO starts to become a full-time job in itself and the strategic role of Marketing gets short-changed. A study of mid-size companies by the University of Texas showed that companies that separated the roles of Marketing and Sales were much more likely to grow faster than the industry average.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic;\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Sales and Marketing: Today and the Future</span></span>\r\nSales need to be focused on the now. You can’t run a company unless your sales team is focused on bringing in today’s business. But you can’t really ask your Sales leaders where the company should go next and to develop the 18-month plan to get there without losing focus on today’s revenue. Besides, if your sales executive was really good at developing future-focused business strategies and tying that strategy to the plans and tools of marketing to make it happen, they would be a marketing person and not a now-focused sales person.","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/icon_Sales.png","alias":"sales"},"339":{"id":339,"title":"Marketing","description":" Marketing is the study and management of exchange relationships. It is the business process of creating relationships with and satisfying customers. Because marketing is used to attract customers, it is one of the primary components of business management and commerce. Marketers can direct product to other businesses (B2B marketing) or directly to consumers (B2C marketing).\r\nRegardless of who is being marketed to, several factors, including the perspective the marketers will use. These market orientations determine how marketers will approach the planning stage of marketing. This leads into the marketing mix, which outlines the specifics of the product and how it will be sold. This can in turn, be affected by the environment surrounding the product, the results of marketing research and market research, and the characteristics of the product's target market.\r\nOnce these factors are determined, marketers must then decide what methods will be used to market the product. This decision is based on the factors analyzed in the planning stage as well as where the product is in the product life cycle.\r\nMarketing is defined by the American Marketing Association as &quot;the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large&quot;. The term developed from the original meaning which referred literally to going to market with goods for sale. From a sales process engineering perspective, marketing is &quot;a set of processes that are interconnected and interdependent with other functions of a business aimed at achieving customer interest and satisfaction&quot;.\r\nPhilip Kotler defined marketing as &quot;Satisfying needs and wants through an exchange process&quot;, and a decade later defines it as “a social and managerial process by which individuals and groups obtain what they want and need through creating, offering and exchanging products of value with others.”\r\nThe Chartered Institute of Marketing defines marketing as &quot;the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably&quot;. A similar concept is the value-based marketing which states the role of marketing to contribute to increasing shareholder value. In this context, marketing can be defined as &quot;the management process that seeks to maximise returns to shareholders by developing relationships with valued customers and creating a competitive advantage&quot;.\r\nIn the past, marketing practice tended to be seen as a creative industry, which included advertising, distribution and selling. However, because the academic study of marketing makes extensive use of social sciences, psychology, sociology, mathematics, economics, anthropology and neuroscience, the profession is now widely recognized as a science, allowing numerous universities to offer Master-of-Science (MSc) programs.\r\nThe process of marketing is that of bringing a product to market, which includes these steps: broad market research; market targeting and market segmentation; determining distribution, pricing and promotion strategies; developing a communications strategy; budgeting; and visioning long-term market development goals. Many parts of the marketing process (e.g. product design, art director, brand management, advertising, inbound marketing, copywriting etc.) involve use of the creative arts.","materialsDescription":"<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">What the differences between B2B and B2C Marketing?</span>\r\nThe different goals of B2B and B2C marketing lead to differences in the B2B and B2C markets. The main differences in these markets are demand, purchasing volume, amount of customers, customer concentration, distribution, buying nature, buying influences, negotiations, reciprocity, leasing and promotional methods.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \">Demand:</span> B2B demand is derived because businesses buy products based on how much demand there is for the final consumer product. Businesses buy products based on customer's wants and needs. B2C demand is primarily because customers buy products based on their own wants and needs.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \">Purchasing Volume:</span> Businesses buy products in large volumes to distribute to consumers. Consumers buy products in smaller volumes suitable for personal use.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \">Amount of Customers:</span> There are relatively fewer businesses to market to than direct consumers.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \">Customer Concentration:</span> Businesses that specialize in a particular market tend to be geographically concentrated while customers that buy products from these businesses are not concentrated.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \">Distribution:</span> B2B products pass directly from the producer of the product to the business while B2C products must additionally go through a wholesaler or retailer.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \">Buying Nature:</span> B2B purchasing is a formal process done by professional buyers and sellers while B2C purchasing is informal.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \">Buying Influences:</span> B2B purchasing is influenced by multiple people in various departments such as quality control, accounting, and logistics while B2C marketing is only influenced by the person making the purchase and possibly a few others.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \">Negotiations:</span> In B2B marketing, negotiating for lower prices or added benefits is commonly accepted while in B2C marketing (particularly in Western cultures) prices are fixed.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \">Reciprocity:</span> Businesses tend to buy from businesses they sell to. For example, a business that sells printer ink is more likely to buy office chairs from a supplier that buys the business's printer ink. In B2C marketing, this does not occur because consumers are not also selling products.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \">Leasing:</span> Businesses tend to lease expensive items while consumers tend to save up to buy expensive items.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \">Promotional Methods:</span> In B2B marketing, the most common promotional method is personal selling. B2C marketing mostly uses sales promotion, public relations, advertising, and social media.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">What are marketing orientations?</span>\r\nA marketing orientation has been defined as a &quot;philosophy of business management.&quot; or &quot;a corporate state of mind&quot; or as an &quot;organization[al] culture&quot;. Although scholars continue to debate the precise nature of specific orientations that inform marketing practice, the most commonly cited orientations are as follows:\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Product</span></span>\r\nA firm employing a product orientation is mainly concerned with the quality of its product. A product orientation is based on the assumption that all things being equal, consumers will purchase products of superior quality. The approach is most effective when the firm has deep insights into customer needs and desires as derived from research and/or intuition and understands consumer's quality expectations and price consumers are willing to pay. Although the product orientation has largely been supplanted by the marketing orientation, firms practicing a product orientation can still be found in haute couture and arts marketing.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Sales</span></span>\r\nA sales orientation focuses on the selling/promotion of the firm's existing products, rather than developing new products to satisfy unmet needs or wants. This orientation seeks to attain the highest possible sales through promotion and direct sales techniques. The sales orientation &quot;is typically practiced with unsought goods.&quot; One study found that industrial companies are more likely to hold a sales orientation than consumer goods companies. The approach may also suit scenarios in which a firm holds dead stock, or otherwise sells a product that is in high demand, with little likelihood of changes in consumer tastes diminishing demand.\r\nA 2011 meta-analyses found that the factors with the greatest impact on sales performance are a salesperson's sales-related knowledge (knowledge of market segments, sales presentation skills, conflict resolution, and products), degree of adaptiveness (changing behavior based on the aforementioned knowledge), role clarity (salesperson's role is to expressly to sell), cognitive aptitude (intelligence) and work engagement (motivation and interest in a sales role).\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Production</span></span>\r\nA firm focusing on a production orientation specializes in producing as much as possible of a given product or service in order to achieve economies of scale or economies of scope. A production orientation may be deployed when a high demand for a product or service exists, coupled with certainty that consumer tastes and preferences remain relatively constant (similar to the sales orientation). The so-called production era is thought to have dominated marketing practice from the 1860s to the 1930s, but other theorists argue that evidence of the production orientation can still be found in some companies or industries. Specifically, Kotler and Armstrong note that the production philosophy is &quot;one of the oldest philosophies that guides sellers... [and] is still useful in some situations.&quot;\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Marketing</span></span>\r\nThe marketing orientation is the most common orientation used in contemporary marketing. It is a customer-centric approach that involves a firm basing its marketing program around products that suit new consumer tastes. Firms adopting a marketing orientation typically engage in extensive market research to gauge consumer desires, use R&amp;D (Research &amp; Development) to develop a product attuned to the revealed information, and then utilize promotion techniques to ensure consumers are aware of the product's existence and the benefits it can deliver. Scales designed to measure a firm's overall market orientation have been developed and found to be robust in a variety of contexts.\r\nThe marketing orientation has three prime facets, which are:\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \">Customer orientation:</span> A firm in the market economy can survive by producing goods that people are willing and able to buy. Consequently, ascertaining consumer demand is vital for a firm's future viability and even existence as a going concern.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \">Organizational orientation:</span> The marketing department is of prime importance within the functional level of an organization. Information from the marketing department is used to guide the actions of a company's other departments.\r\nAs an example, a marketing department could ascertain (via marketing research) that consumers desired a new type of product or a new usage for an existing product. With this in mind, the marketing department would inform the R&amp;D department to create a prototype of a product/service based on consumers' new desires.\r\nThe production department would then start to manufacture the product, while the marketing department would focus on the promotion, distribution, pricing, etc. of the product. Additionally, a firm's finance department would be consulted, with respect to securing appropriate funding for the development, production, and promotion of the product. Finance may oppose the required capital expenditure since it could undermine a healthy cash flow for the organization.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic;\">Mutually beneficial exchange:</span> In a transaction in the market economy, a firm gains revenue, which thus leads to more profits, market shares, and/or sales. A consumer, on the other hand, gains the satisfaction of a need/want, utility, reliability and value for money from the purchase of a product or service.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic;\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Societal marketing</span></span>\r\nA number of scholars and practitioners have argued that marketers have a greater social responsibility than simply satisfying customers and providing them with superior value. Marketing organizations that have embraced the societal marketing concept typically identify key stakeholder groups such as employees, customers, and local communities. Companies that adopt a societal marketing perspective typically practice triple bottom line reporting whereby they publish social impact and environmental impact reports alongside financial performance reports. Sustainable marketing or green marketing is an extension of societal marketing.","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/icon_Marketing.png","alias":"marketing"},"341":{"id":341,"title":"Customer Service","description":" Customer service is the process of ensuring customer satisfaction with a product or service. Often, customer service takes place while performing a transaction for the customer, such as making a sale or returning an item. Customer service can take the form of in-person interaction, a phone call, self-service systems, or by other means.\r\nCustomer service is an important part of maintaining ongoing client relationships, which is key to continuing revenue. For this reason, many companies have worked hard to increase their customer satisfaction levels.\r\nMost successful businesses recognize the importance of providing outstanding customer service. Courteous and empathetic interaction with a trained customer service representative can mean the difference between losing or retaining a customer.\r\nWhen problems arise, customers should receive timely attention to the issue. Prompt attention to emails and phone calls is critical to maintaining good relations. Requiring customers to stand in long lines or sit on hold can sour an interaction before it begins.\r\nIdeally, customer service should be a one-stop endeavor for the consumer. For example, if a customer calls a helpline regarding a problem with a product, the customer service representative should follow through with the customer until the issue is fully resolved.\r\nThis may entail scheduling appointments with in-person repair personnel if the problem cannot be resolved on the phone, or transferring a call to skilled technicians in another department. Proactively following up with the customer to ensure that he or she is fully satisfied is another smart move.","materialsDescription":" What are customer service standards?\r\nCustomer service standards are an internal corporate set of rules governing the company's customer service activities, an algorithm for communicating with customers, and general standards for responding to unusual situations. The standard of customer service is an integral part of the corporate standard of the company.\r\nFunctions of customer service standards:\r\n<ol><li>To order. The client does not encounter problems, does not see them, which means that he is confident that all the staff without exception are professionals who know their business.</li><li>To control. It is difficult to assess and monitor the work of each manager if there are no clear criteria for evaluation. At the same time, the implementation of the sales plan cannot be the only parameter of the assessment; you need to know whether the manager of customer service standards adopted in this company adheres.</li><li>To adapt. Among other things, the availability of customer service standards simplifies the procedure.</li></ol>\r\nCustomer service standards are effective if the customer does not see the difference between the work of two (or more) managers, and sees only “proprietary” service, always the same, regardless of any external factors or circumstances. The customer service standard, which has been tested in practice, backed up by experience (perhaps even someone else's), created on the basis of analytical studies and recognized methods, can be called &quot;gold&quot;. It allows you to increase profits, improve the image of the company, attract new customers.\r\nCustomer service standards are an important part of the company's brand. But, in addition, the standards are necessary and other units, in particular, the department to work with staff. Therefore, their development must take into account the needs of all interested services of the company.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">What is the purpose of introducing customer service standards in the company?</span>\r\nThe objectives of implementing the standards are as follows:\r\n<ul><li>For employees with experience: minimize the number of erroneous and unnecessary actions. The result of this will be saving time of each employee (no errors - no need to spend time correcting them). And, as a result, increased productivity.</li><li>For novice employees: customer service standards allow you to transfer the necessary knowledge in the most concise manner and in a short time.</li><li>For the company: the abolition of dependence on the old-timers. Not all employees who have worked in the company for many years (or even since the day of foundation) are able to resist the so-called star disease. Having knowledge and experience, a person loses the ability to objectively evaluate his work, he begins to think that he is the best manager in the company. It can end very badly - in the event of dismissal, such an employee will take the base, and turn clients against the company. Standards for customer service are needed to ensure that all employees can be assessed on a single scale, based on the actual benefits they bring to the company, as well as the attitude of the employee to the company.</li><li>For the company: the uniformity of control activities of managers. Standards are unequivocal, exclude double interpretations, and therefore cannot cause controversy about the rightness of an employee or employer.</li><li>For managers: the standards of uniform customer service are the same for all managers, and this makes it possible to make the pay of each manager absolutely transparent and intelligible. Realizing that there will be no double interpretations, the manager may not be afraid that he will be paid less than expected - all his mistakes and achievements are immediately visible and understandable.</li></ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">The application of service standards allows you:</span>\r\n<ul><li>to develop a company style in dealing with clients;</li><li>to increase the effectiveness of the work of managers with new customers;</li><li>to bring the quality of communication with customers to a higher level;</li><li>to create a positive opinion of the company about the company, so that it can be recommended to its acquaintances, thus increasing the number of potential and then real customers;</li><li>to minimize conflicts between the manager and the customer;</li><li>to develop a technology for training newcomers;</li><li>to transfer the assessment of the work of the manager from the subjective to the objective, transparent and understandable to everyone;</li><li>to establish a procedure for controlling the work of personnel;</li><li>to increase the motivation of managers to work.</li></ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Benefits of applying service standards</span>\r\n<ul><li>The accumulation of experience: the entire base focuses on the company, and not on the hands of managers, &quot;old-timers.&quot; Thus, the departure of one or several “old” employees does not become a “natural disaster” for the company.</li><li>Motivation, analysis and control: customer service standards make it possible to develop a transparent scheme of managers' motivation based on a clear, almost mathematical analysis of their work. The sales process is optimized.</li><li>Setting goals. With the help of standards, the company has the ability to set clear, reasonable plans. This allows you to keep the atmosphere in the team friendly and stable, and the lack of &quot;muffled&quot; tasks - to increase the loyalty of managers to the company.</li><li>Standards of customer service is a fairly mobile system that allows you to immediately detect errors in working with clients and quickly eliminate them. In addition, at any stage of working with a client, the head of the sales department can intervene in the process, noticing an error in the work of the manager, and even be proactive in order to prevent an error to which the manager is heading.</li><li>Quick and easy start for beginners. Customer service standards are actually a knowledge base, collected, analyzed, and streamlined. Such information is easily transmitted and assimilated by beginners, which means that the beginner quickly gets to work and starts to make a profit. In addition, a newbie will not spoil relations with a client by awkward actions, since he already knows what to do in any conflict and problem situations.</li><li>Customer confidence. Customer service standards allow the latter to feel confident in the company - no matter where the customer is, he will always easily recognize “his” company by brand features and can be absolutely sure that in a small town they will be served as qualitatively as in a million-plus city, because that the company is well aware of their work. So, such a company can be trusted.</li></ul>","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/icon_Customer_Service.png","alias":"customer-service"}},"branches":"Information Technology","companyUrl":"http://www.absaloncrm.com/","countryCodes":["SWE"],"certifications":[],"isSeller":true,"isSupplier":true,"isVendor":true,"presenterCodeLng":"","seo":{"title":"Absalon International","keywords":"Dynamics, Microsoft, Absalon, solutions, International, that, companies, with","description":"Absalon International is a Swedish software company developing industry-specific ISV solutions for Microsoft Dynamics CRM.\r\n\r\nOur team has been developing ISV solutions on Microsoft Dynamics CRM since 2004 with a proven and successful track record. Absalon Int","og:title":"Absalon International","og:description":"Absalon International is a Swedish software company developing industry-specific ISV solutions for Microsoft Dynamics CRM.\r\n\r\nOur team has been developing ISV solutions on Microsoft Dynamics CRM since 2004 with a proven and successful track record. Absalon Int","og:image":"https://old.roi4cio.com/uploads/roi/company/Absalon_CRM.jpg"},"eventUrl":"","vendorPartners":[{"vendor":"Microsoft","partnershipLevel":"","countries":"","partnersType":""}],"supplierPartners":[{"supplier":"MUK (supplier)","partnershipLevel":"","countries":"","partnersType":""}],"vendoredProducts":[{"id":799,"logoURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/Absalon_CRM.jpg","logo":true,"scheme":false,"title":"Absalon CRM for Consumer Goods","vendorVerified":0,"rating":"1.40","implementationsCount":0,"suppliersCount":0,"supplierPartnersCount":1,"alias":"absalon-crm-for-consumer-goods","companyTitle":"Absalon International","companyTypes":["supplier","vendor"],"companyId":3711,"companyAlias":"absalon-international","description":"<span style=\"font-weight: bold; text-decoration-line: underline;\">Absalon Consumer Goods – For the Sales Manager</span> Absalon CRM for consumer goods is based on the most widely used processes in sales within the industry. The solution will help the company strengthen its brands while minimizing the time spent on administration. <span style=\"font-weight: bold; text-decoration-line: underline;\">Absalon Consumer Goods – For the Sales Rep</span> Sales representatives’ main focus is to spread information about the various products and brands that their company offers the market. An important task is to report received feedback acquired during the meeting so that the brand can be strengthen even further in the future. With Absalon add-on, we combine a solid database of CRM with efficient processes to report sales meeting, limiting the time spent on administration, and all this is achievable through mobile devices and computers. <span style=\"font-weight: bold; text-decoration-line: underline;\">Absalon Consumer Goods – For the Sales Manager</span> <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Microsoft Dynamics CRM</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Manage products, product groups, brands, price lists and discounts</li> <li>Use the built-in marketing lists to reach accounts and contacts</li> <li>Take advantage of Microsoft CRM dashboards, views and charts to track the progress of sales work day by day</li> <li>With Microsoft Social Engagement, you can monitor social media activities and gather information based on keywords, such as the company's brands</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Absalon add-on data setup</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Organize and guide your sales force by creating business plans, t&nbsp; erritory plans and action plans</li> <li>Prepare materials for each brand so that the sales team works effectively at each sales meeting, and report back meetings directly</li> <li>Understand how the business develops by following up on the data that the sales representative reports after meetings</li> <li>Add up the presentation materials, CLM, that the sales representative can present on their mobile devices or laptops, at sales meetings. Smoothly report feedback back into the system immediately after the meeting</li> <li>Keep track of the distribution of your products on the shelves at your customers</li> <li>Track awareness for your brands at organizations and contacts</li> <li>Manage expenses and product samples to customers</li> <li>Use Absalon add-on to create events and invite contacts</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Absalon add-on facilitates for the sales reps</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Plan a week effectively using Absalon Sales Cockpit as a visual tool for sales meetings&nbsp;</li> <li>Find your way to customers with help of the map of Absalon add-on that creates the best route</li> <li>Plan for distribution materials and samples ahead and check so sales representatives have what they need for the week</li> <li>Set up the data so that the sales process is made more uniform and streamlined, and time spent on administration is limited</li> <li>Use pre-defined messages, feedback and CLM for each brand</li> <li>The recurring user interface for reporting sales meetings accelerates the reporting process</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; text-decoration-line: underline;\">Absalon Consumer Goods – For the Sales Rep</span> <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Microsoft Dynamics CRM</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Use the built in marketing lists to contact organizations and contact persons with similar features</li> <li>Microsoft CRM dashboards, views and charts helps you following the sales work day by day and see what needs to achieve to reach the set goals</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Absalon add-on data setup</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Use the built-in map function to locate your contacts and plan the best possible route&nbsp;</li> <li>Plan your week using Absalon Sales Cockpit, which gives you a good overview of the week's various sales meetings</li> <li>Evaluate how your message has been received by the various contact persons</li> <li>Set up action plans with predefined messages and feedback, CLM and hand-out materials</li> <li>Copy an action plan and recycle the data that is already available in the system</li> <li>Create sales meetings on an action plan to auto generate the data that you will use in your sales meeting, and report the meeting in the system afterwards</li> <li>Check contribution margin ratio for each contact in your plan so that you reach your goals</li> <li>Invite your contacts to events with a few simple steps</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Consumer Goods Sales Rep App</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Absalon Sales Rep App works both online and offline, which allows you to report the meetings no matter where you are</li> <li>The user experiences that the app is easy to understand and easy to use</li> <li>Filtering data in the app to match the needs you have as a sales rep and makes it easier to report meetings</li> <li>Get the contact person's signature on the location of the samples that you handed out</li> <li>Switch between the laptop and the app to find the most efficient way to work</li> </ul>","shortDescription":"Absalon CRM for consumer goods is based on the most widely used processes in sales within the industry. The solution will help the company strengthen its brands while minimizing the time spent on administration.","type":null,"isRoiCalculatorAvaliable":false,"isConfiguratorAvaliable":false,"bonus":100,"usingCount":0,"sellingCount":0,"discontinued":0,"rebateForPoc":0,"rebate":0,"seo":{"title":"Absalon CRM for Consumer Goods","keywords":"sales, Absalon, that, your, Sales, meetings, data, report","description":"<span style=\"font-weight: bold; text-decoration-line: underline;\">Absalon Consumer Goods – For the Sales Manager</span> Absalon CRM for consumer goods is based on the most widely used processes in sales within the industry. The solution will help the company s","og:title":"Absalon CRM for Consumer Goods","og:description":"<span style=\"font-weight: bold; text-decoration-line: underline;\">Absalon Consumer Goods – For the Sales Manager</span> Absalon CRM for consumer goods is based on the most widely used processes in sales within the industry. The solution will help the company s","og:image":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/Absalon_CRM.jpg"},"eventUrl":"","translationId":799,"dealDetails":null,"roi":null,"price":null,"bonusForReference":null,"templateData":[],"testingArea":"","categories":[{"id":71,"title":"CRM - Customer Relationship Management","alias":"crm-customer-relationship-management","description":"<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Customer service</span> is the provision of service to customers before, during and after a purchase. The perception of success of such interactions is dependent on employees &quot;who can adjust themselves to the personality of the guest&quot;. Customer service concerns the priority an organization assigns to customer service relative to components such as product innovation and pricing. In this sense, an organization that values good customer service may spend more money in training employees than the average organization or may proactively interview customers for feedback.\r\nA <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">customer support</span> is a range of customer services to assist customers in making cost effective and correct use of a product. It includes assistance in planning, installation, training, trouble shooting, maintenance, upgrading, and disposal of a product. These services even may be done at customer's side where he/she uses the product or service. In this case it is called &quot;at home customer services&quot; or &quot;at home customer support.&quot;\r\nRegarding technology, products such as mobile phones, televisions, computers, software products or other electronic or mechanical goods, it is termed technical support. \r\nCustomer service may be provided by a person (e.g., sales and service representative), or by automated means, such as kiosks, Internet sites, and apps.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">CRM </span>(Customer Relationship Management) is an approach to manage a company's interaction with current and potential customers. It uses data analysis about customers' history with a company to improve business relationships with customers, specifically focusing on customer retention and ultimately driving sales growth.\r\nOne important aspect of the CRM approach is the systems of CRM that compile data from a range of different communication channels, including a company's website, telephone, email, live chat, marketing materials and more recently, social media. Through the CRM approach and the systems used to facilitate it, businesses learn more about their target audiences and how to best cater to their needs.\r\nCRM helps users focus on their organization’s relationships with individual people including customers, service users, colleagues, or suppliers.\r\nWhen people talk about customer relationship management system, they might mean any of three things: \r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">CRM as Technology</span>: This is a technology product, often in the cloud, that teams use to record, report and analyse interactions between the company and users. This is also called a CRM system or solution.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">CRM as a Strategy</span>: This is a business’ philosophy about how relationships with customers and potential customers should be managed.&nbsp; </li><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">CRM as a Process</span>: Think of this as a system a business adopts to nurture and manage those relationships.</li></ul>\r\n<br /><br /><br />","materialsDescription":"<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal;\">Why is CRM important?</span></h1>\r\nCRM management system enables a business to deepen its relationships with customers, service users, colleagues, partners and suppliers.\r\nForging good relationships and keeping track of prospects and customers is crucial for customer acquisition and retention, which is at the heart of a CRM’s function. You can see everything in one place — a simple, customizable dashboard that can tell you a customer’s previous history with you, the status of their orders, any outstanding customer service issues, and more.\r\nGartner predicts that by 2021, CRM technology will be the single largest revenue area of spending in enterprise software. If your business is going to last, you know that you need a strategy for the future. For forward-thinking businesses, CRM is the framework for that strategy.\r\n<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal;\">What are the benefits of CRM?</span></h1>\r\nBy collecting and organising data about customer interactions, making it accessible and actionable for all, and facilitating analysis of that data, CRM offers many benefits and advantages.<br />The benefits and advantages of CRM include:\r\n<ul><li>Enhanced contact management</li><li>Cross-team collaboration</li><li>Heightened productivity</li><li>Empowered sales management</li><li>Accurate sales forecasting</li><li>Reliable reporting</li><li>Improved sales metrics</li><li>Increased customer satisfaction and retention</li><li>Boosted marketing ROI</li><li>Enriched products and services</li></ul>\r\n<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal;\">What are the key features of most popular CRM software programs?</span></h1>\r\nWhile many CRM solutions differ in their specific value propositions — depending on your business size, priority function, or industry type — they usually share some core features. These, in fact, are the foundation of any top CRM software, without which you might end up using an inferior app or an over-rated address book. So, let’s discuss the key features you need to look for when figuring out the best CRM software for your business.\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Contact management</span>. The best CRM solutions aren’t just an address book that only organizes contact details. It manages customer data in a centralized place and gives you a 360-degree view of your customers. You should be able to organize customers’ personal information, demographics, interactions, and transactions in ways that are meaningful to your goals or processes. Moreover, a good contact management feature lets you personalize your outreach campaign. By collecting personal, social, and purchase data, it will help you to segment target audience groups in different ways.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Reporting and dashboards</span>. These features of customer relationship management allow you to use analytics to interpret customer data. Reporting is very useful if you want to consolidate disparate data and churn out insights in different visualizations. This lets you make better decisions or proactively deal with market trends and customer behavioral patterns. The more visual widgets a CRM software has, the better you can present reports. Furthermore, a best customer relationship management software will generate real-time data, making reporting more accurate and timely. Reporting also keeps you tab on sales opportunities like upsell, resell, and cross-sell, especially when integrated with e-commerce platforms.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Lead management</span>. These features let you manage leads all the way to win-loss stage. They pave a clear path to conversion, so you can quickly assess how the business is performing. One of the main three legs that comprises the best client relationship management software (the other two being contact management and reporting), lead management unburdens the sales team from follow-ups, tracking, and repetitive tasks.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Deals and tasks</span>. Deals and tasks are closely associated with leads. Deals are leads at the negotiation stage, so it’s critical to keep a close eye on their associated tasks for a higher chance of conversion.<br />CRM software tools should also let you track both deals and tasks in their respective windows or across the sales stages. Whether you’re viewing a contact or analyzing the sales pipeline, you should be able to immediately check the deal’s tasks and details. Deals and tasks should also have user permissions to protect leaks of sensitive data. Similarly, alerts are critical to tasks so deadlines are met. Notifications are usually sent via email or prominently displayed on the user’s dashboard.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Campaign management</span>. Solid CRM software will integrate this feature to enable marketing processes from outreach concept to A/B testing to deployment and to post analysis. This will allow you to sort campaigns to target segments in your contacts and define deployment strategies. You will also be able to define metrics for various channels, then plow back the insights generated by post-campaign analytics into planning more campaigns.<br />Recurring outreach efforts can also be automated. For instance, you can set to instantly appropriate content to contacts based on their interest or send tiered autoresponders based on campaign feedback.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Email management</span>. By integrating with popular email clients like Gmail and Outlook, CRM solutions can capture email messages and sort important details that can be saved in contacts or synced with leads. They can also track activities like opened emails, forwarded emails, clicked links, and downloaded files. Emails can also be qualified for prospecting.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Social media management. </span>Popular CRM systems feature an integrated social media management where you can view different social media pages from the CRM’s interface. This is a convenient way to post, reply on, and manage all your pages. Likewise, this feature gives you a better perspective on how customers are interacting with your brand. A glean of their likes and dislikes, interests, shares, and public conversations helps you to assess customer biases and preferences. Customers are also increasingly using social media to contact companies; hence, a good CRM should alert you for brand mentions.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Mobile access</span>. With more users accessing apps via mobile devices, many vendors have been prioritizing mobile-first platforms. Emergence Capital Partners study found over 300 mobile-first apps so far and CRM is definitely one their targets. Many CRM solutions have both Android and iOS apps. Mobile access works in two ways to be highly appreciated: accessing data and inputting data while on location. Field sales with the latest sales information on hand may be able to interest prospects better. Conversely, sales reps can quickly update deals across the pipeline even as they come off a client meeting.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/CRM_-_Customer_Relationship_Management.png"},{"id":337,"title":"Sales","alias":"sales","description":" Sales are activities related to selling or the number of goods or services sold in a given targeted time period.\r\nThe seller, or the provider of the goods or services, completes a sale in response to an acquisition, appropriation, requisition, or a direct interaction with the buyer at the point of sale. There is a passing of title (property or ownership) of the item, and the settlement of a price, in which agreement is reached on a price for which transfer of ownership of the item will occur. The seller, not the purchaser, typically executes the sale and it may be completed prior to the obligation of payment. In the case of indirect interaction, a person who sells goods or service on behalf of the owner is known as a salesman or saleswoman or salesperson, but this often refers to someone selling goods in a store/shop, in which case other terms are also common, including salesclerk, shop assistant, and retail clerk.\r\nIn common law countries, sales are governed generally by the common law and commercial codes. In the United States, the laws governing sales of goods are somewhat uniform to the extent that most jurisdictions have adopted Article 2 of the Uniform Commercial Code, albeit with some non-uniform variations.\r\nA person or organization expressing an interest in acquiring the offered item of value is referred to as a potential buyer, prospective customer, or prospect. Buying and selling are understood to be two sides of the same &quot;coin&quot; or transaction. Both seller and buyer engage in a process of negotiation to consummate the exchange of values. The exchange, or selling, process has implied rules and identifiable stages. It is implied that the selling process will proceed fairly and ethically so that the parties end up nearly equally rewarded. The stages of selling, and buying, involve getting acquainted, assessing each party's need for the other's item of value, and determining if the values to be exchanged are equivalent or nearly so, or, in buyer's terms, &quot;worth the price&quot;. Sometimes, sellers have to use their own experiences when selling products with appropriate discounts.\r\nAlthough the skills required are different, from a management viewpoint, sales is a part of marketing. Sales often form a separate grouping in a corporate structure, employing separate specialist operatives known as salespersons (singular: salesperson). Selling is considered by many to be a sort of persuading &quot;art&quot;. Contrary to popular belief, the methodological approach of selling refers to a systematic process of repetitive and measurable milestones, by which a salesman relates his or her offering of a product or service in return enabling the buyer to achieve their goal in an economic way.","materialsDescription":" <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What's the Difference Between Sales and Marketing?</span>\r\nSales and Marketing: two terms we often hear together when working with mid-size companies. In some ways, this is logical because the two need to work together. But in fact, Sales and Marketing are two very different functions and require very different skills.\r\nBusiness leaders know what Operations are; they make stuff. They know what Accounting is; they record and control the money. And they know what Sales do; they sell stuff. So if you are not making stuff, selling stuff, or recording the money—what is marketing and why do you need it?\r\nWhat's the difference between Sales and Marketing? To answer this question, let's define what Sales and Marketing are separately and how they support one another.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic;\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What is Marketing? Aligning with Customers, Now and for the Future</span></span>\r\nA key job of Marketing is to understand the marketplace from the perspective of the customer looking back towards the company and helping lead the company where it should be in the future. Marketing’s job is to direct the organization toward the segments, or groups of customers and channels where the company can profitably compete. It should help the organization see how it needs to modify its product offerings, pricing, and communication so that it meets the needs of the distribution channel or end customers.\r\nMarketing also needs to convert the market understanding into tools and tactics to attract the market, build (often digital) relationships, and develop leads. Without Sales, Marketing efforts run short. Marketing directs Sales as to where they should be hunting and what ammo to use. Note, however, that if Marketing becomes a sales support function focused only on the now, the future can become lost.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic;\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Without Marketing, Sales Suffers</span></span>\r\nNot even the best hunter can bring home dinner if they are shooting blanks at decoys. Markets are constantly changing. The job of marketing is to stay ahead of the changes and help the hunters see where they should be hunting and provide them with the right ammunition. If Marketing is only focused on delivering the ammunition for today, nobody will see where the industry is moving or where the company needs to hunt next. This limits growth not only for Sales and Marketing but also for your entire organization.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic;\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Can You be Both Sales and Marketing?</span></span>\r\nIn all my years, working for companies that ranged from Fortune 100 to mid-size companies I have never met anyone who was really good at both sales and marketing. I have held the title of VP of Sales and Marketing, managing a 500 person sales and merchandising force. I was really a marketing person with sales authority. The skills required to focus on the now and the push of sales are different. In many ways, they are contrary to the skills of looking to the future and the customer perspective of marketing.\r\nEvery Sales organization feels they have a good understanding of their customers. But every Sales conversation with a customer has a sales transaction lurking in the background. Therefore, customers can never be completely open about their needs and want when talking to a sales person.\r\nFor a company to really grow, someone must have the job of looking out the window towards where the company needs to go in the future. For many companies, this is the job of the CEO and Sales hires someone to do some sales support and gives them a marketing title. But as companies grow, the job of CEO starts to become a full-time job in itself and the strategic role of Marketing gets short-changed. A study of mid-size companies by the University of Texas showed that companies that separated the roles of Marketing and Sales were much more likely to grow faster than the industry average.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic;\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Sales and Marketing: Today and the Future</span></span>\r\nSales need to be focused on the now. You can’t run a company unless your sales team is focused on bringing in today’s business. But you can’t really ask your Sales leaders where the company should go next and to develop the 18-month plan to get there without losing focus on today’s revenue. Besides, if your sales executive was really good at developing future-focused business strategies and tying that strategy to the plans and tools of marketing to make it happen, they would be a marketing person and not a now-focused sales person.","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/icon_Sales.png"},{"id":339,"title":"Marketing","alias":"marketing","description":" Marketing is the study and management of exchange relationships. It is the business process of creating relationships with and satisfying customers. Because marketing is used to attract customers, it is one of the primary components of business management and commerce. Marketers can direct product to other businesses (B2B marketing) or directly to consumers (B2C marketing).\r\nRegardless of who is being marketed to, several factors, including the perspective the marketers will use. These market orientations determine how marketers will approach the planning stage of marketing. This leads into the marketing mix, which outlines the specifics of the product and how it will be sold. This can in turn, be affected by the environment surrounding the product, the results of marketing research and market research, and the characteristics of the product's target market.\r\nOnce these factors are determined, marketers must then decide what methods will be used to market the product. This decision is based on the factors analyzed in the planning stage as well as where the product is in the product life cycle.\r\nMarketing is defined by the American Marketing Association as &quot;the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large&quot;. The term developed from the original meaning which referred literally to going to market with goods for sale. From a sales process engineering perspective, marketing is &quot;a set of processes that are interconnected and interdependent with other functions of a business aimed at achieving customer interest and satisfaction&quot;.\r\nPhilip Kotler defined marketing as &quot;Satisfying needs and wants through an exchange process&quot;, and a decade later defines it as “a social and managerial process by which individuals and groups obtain what they want and need through creating, offering and exchanging products of value with others.”\r\nThe Chartered Institute of Marketing defines marketing as &quot;the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably&quot;. A similar concept is the value-based marketing which states the role of marketing to contribute to increasing shareholder value. In this context, marketing can be defined as &quot;the management process that seeks to maximise returns to shareholders by developing relationships with valued customers and creating a competitive advantage&quot;.\r\nIn the past, marketing practice tended to be seen as a creative industry, which included advertising, distribution and selling. However, because the academic study of marketing makes extensive use of social sciences, psychology, sociology, mathematics, economics, anthropology and neuroscience, the profession is now widely recognized as a science, allowing numerous universities to offer Master-of-Science (MSc) programs.\r\nThe process of marketing is that of bringing a product to market, which includes these steps: broad market research; market targeting and market segmentation; determining distribution, pricing and promotion strategies; developing a communications strategy; budgeting; and visioning long-term market development goals. Many parts of the marketing process (e.g. product design, art director, brand management, advertising, inbound marketing, copywriting etc.) involve use of the creative arts.","materialsDescription":"<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">What the differences between B2B and B2C Marketing?</span>\r\nThe different goals of B2B and B2C marketing lead to differences in the B2B and B2C markets. The main differences in these markets are demand, purchasing volume, amount of customers, customer concentration, distribution, buying nature, buying influences, negotiations, reciprocity, leasing and promotional methods.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \">Demand:</span> B2B demand is derived because businesses buy products based on how much demand there is for the final consumer product. Businesses buy products based on customer's wants and needs. B2C demand is primarily because customers buy products based on their own wants and needs.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \">Purchasing Volume:</span> Businesses buy products in large volumes to distribute to consumers. Consumers buy products in smaller volumes suitable for personal use.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \">Amount of Customers:</span> There are relatively fewer businesses to market to than direct consumers.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \">Customer Concentration:</span> Businesses that specialize in a particular market tend to be geographically concentrated while customers that buy products from these businesses are not concentrated.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \">Distribution:</span> B2B products pass directly from the producer of the product to the business while B2C products must additionally go through a wholesaler or retailer.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \">Buying Nature:</span> B2B purchasing is a formal process done by professional buyers and sellers while B2C purchasing is informal.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \">Buying Influences:</span> B2B purchasing is influenced by multiple people in various departments such as quality control, accounting, and logistics while B2C marketing is only influenced by the person making the purchase and possibly a few others.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \">Negotiations:</span> In B2B marketing, negotiating for lower prices or added benefits is commonly accepted while in B2C marketing (particularly in Western cultures) prices are fixed.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \">Reciprocity:</span> Businesses tend to buy from businesses they sell to. For example, a business that sells printer ink is more likely to buy office chairs from a supplier that buys the business's printer ink. In B2C marketing, this does not occur because consumers are not also selling products.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \">Leasing:</span> Businesses tend to lease expensive items while consumers tend to save up to buy expensive items.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \">Promotional Methods:</span> In B2B marketing, the most common promotional method is personal selling. B2C marketing mostly uses sales promotion, public relations, advertising, and social media.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">What are marketing orientations?</span>\r\nA marketing orientation has been defined as a &quot;philosophy of business management.&quot; or &quot;a corporate state of mind&quot; or as an &quot;organization[al] culture&quot;. Although scholars continue to debate the precise nature of specific orientations that inform marketing practice, the most commonly cited orientations are as follows:\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Product</span></span>\r\nA firm employing a product orientation is mainly concerned with the quality of its product. A product orientation is based on the assumption that all things being equal, consumers will purchase products of superior quality. The approach is most effective when the firm has deep insights into customer needs and desires as derived from research and/or intuition and understands consumer's quality expectations and price consumers are willing to pay. Although the product orientation has largely been supplanted by the marketing orientation, firms practicing a product orientation can still be found in haute couture and arts marketing.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Sales</span></span>\r\nA sales orientation focuses on the selling/promotion of the firm's existing products, rather than developing new products to satisfy unmet needs or wants. This orientation seeks to attain the highest possible sales through promotion and direct sales techniques. The sales orientation &quot;is typically practiced with unsought goods.&quot; One study found that industrial companies are more likely to hold a sales orientation than consumer goods companies. The approach may also suit scenarios in which a firm holds dead stock, or otherwise sells a product that is in high demand, with little likelihood of changes in consumer tastes diminishing demand.\r\nA 2011 meta-analyses found that the factors with the greatest impact on sales performance are a salesperson's sales-related knowledge (knowledge of market segments, sales presentation skills, conflict resolution, and products), degree of adaptiveness (changing behavior based on the aforementioned knowledge), role clarity (salesperson's role is to expressly to sell), cognitive aptitude (intelligence) and work engagement (motivation and interest in a sales role).\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Production</span></span>\r\nA firm focusing on a production orientation specializes in producing as much as possible of a given product or service in order to achieve economies of scale or economies of scope. A production orientation may be deployed when a high demand for a product or service exists, coupled with certainty that consumer tastes and preferences remain relatively constant (similar to the sales orientation). The so-called production era is thought to have dominated marketing practice from the 1860s to the 1930s, but other theorists argue that evidence of the production orientation can still be found in some companies or industries. Specifically, Kotler and Armstrong note that the production philosophy is &quot;one of the oldest philosophies that guides sellers... [and] is still useful in some situations.&quot;\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Marketing</span></span>\r\nThe marketing orientation is the most common orientation used in contemporary marketing. It is a customer-centric approach that involves a firm basing its marketing program around products that suit new consumer tastes. Firms adopting a marketing orientation typically engage in extensive market research to gauge consumer desires, use R&amp;D (Research &amp; Development) to develop a product attuned to the revealed information, and then utilize promotion techniques to ensure consumers are aware of the product's existence and the benefits it can deliver. Scales designed to measure a firm's overall market orientation have been developed and found to be robust in a variety of contexts.\r\nThe marketing orientation has three prime facets, which are:\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \">Customer orientation:</span> A firm in the market economy can survive by producing goods that people are willing and able to buy. Consequently, ascertaining consumer demand is vital for a firm's future viability and even existence as a going concern.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \">Organizational orientation:</span> The marketing department is of prime importance within the functional level of an organization. Information from the marketing department is used to guide the actions of a company's other departments.\r\nAs an example, a marketing department could ascertain (via marketing research) that consumers desired a new type of product or a new usage for an existing product. With this in mind, the marketing department would inform the R&amp;D department to create a prototype of a product/service based on consumers' new desires.\r\nThe production department would then start to manufacture the product, while the marketing department would focus on the promotion, distribution, pricing, etc. of the product. Additionally, a firm's finance department would be consulted, with respect to securing appropriate funding for the development, production, and promotion of the product. Finance may oppose the required capital expenditure since it could undermine a healthy cash flow for the organization.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic;\">Mutually beneficial exchange:</span> In a transaction in the market economy, a firm gains revenue, which thus leads to more profits, market shares, and/or sales. A consumer, on the other hand, gains the satisfaction of a need/want, utility, reliability and value for money from the purchase of a product or service.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic;\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Societal marketing</span></span>\r\nA number of scholars and practitioners have argued that marketers have a greater social responsibility than simply satisfying customers and providing them with superior value. Marketing organizations that have embraced the societal marketing concept typically identify key stakeholder groups such as employees, customers, and local communities. Companies that adopt a societal marketing perspective typically practice triple bottom line reporting whereby they publish social impact and environmental impact reports alongside financial performance reports. Sustainable marketing or green marketing is an extension of societal marketing.","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/icon_Marketing.png"},{"id":341,"title":"Customer Service","alias":"customer-service","description":" Customer service is the process of ensuring customer satisfaction with a product or service. Often, customer service takes place while performing a transaction for the customer, such as making a sale or returning an item. Customer service can take the form of in-person interaction, a phone call, self-service systems, or by other means.\r\nCustomer service is an important part of maintaining ongoing client relationships, which is key to continuing revenue. For this reason, many companies have worked hard to increase their customer satisfaction levels.\r\nMost successful businesses recognize the importance of providing outstanding customer service. Courteous and empathetic interaction with a trained customer service representative can mean the difference between losing or retaining a customer.\r\nWhen problems arise, customers should receive timely attention to the issue. Prompt attention to emails and phone calls is critical to maintaining good relations. Requiring customers to stand in long lines or sit on hold can sour an interaction before it begins.\r\nIdeally, customer service should be a one-stop endeavor for the consumer. For example, if a customer calls a helpline regarding a problem with a product, the customer service representative should follow through with the customer until the issue is fully resolved.\r\nThis may entail scheduling appointments with in-person repair personnel if the problem cannot be resolved on the phone, or transferring a call to skilled technicians in another department. Proactively following up with the customer to ensure that he or she is fully satisfied is another smart move.","materialsDescription":" What are customer service standards?\r\nCustomer service standards are an internal corporate set of rules governing the company's customer service activities, an algorithm for communicating with customers, and general standards for responding to unusual situations. The standard of customer service is an integral part of the corporate standard of the company.\r\nFunctions of customer service standards:\r\n<ol><li>To order. The client does not encounter problems, does not see them, which means that he is confident that all the staff without exception are professionals who know their business.</li><li>To control. It is difficult to assess and monitor the work of each manager if there are no clear criteria for evaluation. At the same time, the implementation of the sales plan cannot be the only parameter of the assessment; you need to know whether the manager of customer service standards adopted in this company adheres.</li><li>To adapt. Among other things, the availability of customer service standards simplifies the procedure.</li></ol>\r\nCustomer service standards are effective if the customer does not see the difference between the work of two (or more) managers, and sees only “proprietary” service, always the same, regardless of any external factors or circumstances. The customer service standard, which has been tested in practice, backed up by experience (perhaps even someone else's), created on the basis of analytical studies and recognized methods, can be called &quot;gold&quot;. It allows you to increase profits, improve the image of the company, attract new customers.\r\nCustomer service standards are an important part of the company's brand. But, in addition, the standards are necessary and other units, in particular, the department to work with staff. Therefore, their development must take into account the needs of all interested services of the company.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">What is the purpose of introducing customer service standards in the company?</span>\r\nThe objectives of implementing the standards are as follows:\r\n<ul><li>For employees with experience: minimize the number of erroneous and unnecessary actions. The result of this will be saving time of each employee (no errors - no need to spend time correcting them). And, as a result, increased productivity.</li><li>For novice employees: customer service standards allow you to transfer the necessary knowledge in the most concise manner and in a short time.</li><li>For the company: the abolition of dependence on the old-timers. Not all employees who have worked in the company for many years (or even since the day of foundation) are able to resist the so-called star disease. Having knowledge and experience, a person loses the ability to objectively evaluate his work, he begins to think that he is the best manager in the company. It can end very badly - in the event of dismissal, such an employee will take the base, and turn clients against the company. Standards for customer service are needed to ensure that all employees can be assessed on a single scale, based on the actual benefits they bring to the company, as well as the attitude of the employee to the company.</li><li>For the company: the uniformity of control activities of managers. Standards are unequivocal, exclude double interpretations, and therefore cannot cause controversy about the rightness of an employee or employer.</li><li>For managers: the standards of uniform customer service are the same for all managers, and this makes it possible to make the pay of each manager absolutely transparent and intelligible. Realizing that there will be no double interpretations, the manager may not be afraid that he will be paid less than expected - all his mistakes and achievements are immediately visible and understandable.</li></ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">The application of service standards allows you:</span>\r\n<ul><li>to develop a company style in dealing with clients;</li><li>to increase the effectiveness of the work of managers with new customers;</li><li>to bring the quality of communication with customers to a higher level;</li><li>to create a positive opinion of the company about the company, so that it can be recommended to its acquaintances, thus increasing the number of potential and then real customers;</li><li>to minimize conflicts between the manager and the customer;</li><li>to develop a technology for training newcomers;</li><li>to transfer the assessment of the work of the manager from the subjective to the objective, transparent and understandable to everyone;</li><li>to establish a procedure for controlling the work of personnel;</li><li>to increase the motivation of managers to work.</li></ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Benefits of applying service standards</span>\r\n<ul><li>The accumulation of experience: the entire base focuses on the company, and not on the hands of managers, &quot;old-timers.&quot; Thus, the departure of one or several “old” employees does not become a “natural disaster” for the company.</li><li>Motivation, analysis and control: customer service standards make it possible to develop a transparent scheme of managers' motivation based on a clear, almost mathematical analysis of their work. The sales process is optimized.</li><li>Setting goals. With the help of standards, the company has the ability to set clear, reasonable plans. This allows you to keep the atmosphere in the team friendly and stable, and the lack of &quot;muffled&quot; tasks - to increase the loyalty of managers to the company.</li><li>Standards of customer service is a fairly mobile system that allows you to immediately detect errors in working with clients and quickly eliminate them. In addition, at any stage of working with a client, the head of the sales department can intervene in the process, noticing an error in the work of the manager, and even be proactive in order to prevent an error to which the manager is heading.</li><li>Quick and easy start for beginners. Customer service standards are actually a knowledge base, collected, analyzed, and streamlined. Such information is easily transmitted and assimilated by beginners, which means that the beginner quickly gets to work and starts to make a profit. In addition, a newbie will not spoil relations with a client by awkward actions, since he already knows what to do in any conflict and problem situations.</li><li>Customer confidence. Customer service standards allow the latter to feel confident in the company - no matter where the customer is, he will always easily recognize “his” company by brand features and can be absolutely sure that in a small town they will be served as qualitatively as in a million-plus city, because that the company is well aware of their work. So, such a company can be trusted.</li></ul>","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/icon_Customer_Service.png"}],"characteristics":[],"concurentProducts":[],"jobRoles":[],"organizationalFeatures":[],"complementaryCategories":[],"solutions":[],"materials":[],"useCases":[],"best_practices":[],"values":[],"implementations":[]},{"id":801,"logoURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/Absalon_CRM.jpg","logo":true,"scheme":false,"title":"Absalon CRM","vendorVerified":0,"rating":"1.40","implementationsCount":0,"suppliersCount":0,"supplierPartnersCount":1,"alias":"absalon-crm","companyTitle":"Absalon International","companyTypes":["supplier","vendor"],"companyId":3711,"companyAlias":"absalon-international","description":"\r\nAbsalon CRM Modules:\r\n<ol> <li>Marketing</li> <li>Sales</li> <li>Project Management</li> <li>Resource Planning</li> <li>Case Management</li> <li>Service Management</li> </ol>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; text-decoration-line: underline;\">MARKETING</span> The marketing module in Microsoft Dynamics CRM is, together with Absalon CRM, covering marketing lists, customer categorization, account plans, event management and more. <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Microsoft Dynamics CRM</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Support and registration of marketing activities for reporting, follow up and management</li> <li>Marketing lists: Create dynamic marketing lists, that update subsequently, as well as static marketing lists. Full Outlook integration with mailing possibilities straight from the marketing lists.</li> <li>Create process support for your marketing activities, both simple and complex ones</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Absalon add-on</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Categorization of customers based on needs of the organization and the area such as industry, sector or geography</li> <li>Event Management, gather all the information in one place. Contacts as event participants and their status at the event, check list for the event, document management through SharePoint</li> <li>Training Management with courses and participants, reuse data you previously created</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Microsoft add-on products for marketing</span>\r\n<ul> <li>With Microsoft Social Listening you have the possibility to capture activities on social media, arrange searches based on key words and visualize in nice dashboards with graphs and lists</li> <li>Dynamics Marketing gives you the possibility to take care of digital marketing, like newsletters and leads generation, with automation if you like</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">User experience</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Full integration with Outlook contacts and activities</li> <li>Good follow-up possibilities with graphs and views</li> <li>Consistently easy to use interface</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; text-decoration-line: underline;\">SALES</span> Absalon add-on extends the sales module developed from the already well-defined sales support that comes with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. With Absalon add-on the updating of data goes even faster, and administration time is reduced. <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Microsoft Dynamics CRM</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Business Process Flow with guiding steps in order to complete the sales process</li> <li>Track meetings and emails to your sales activities</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Absalon add-on</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Dynamic sales processes, helping you to follow the sales processes that apply to you</li> <li>Support for several simultaneous sales processes</li> <li>With Absalon add-on it’s easy to follow which customers you have contacted (and not contacted) for a certain period of time</li> <li>Customer Plans for targeted customer strategy on activity level with follow-up possibilities</li> <li>Opportunities to follow up recurring income over time</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">User experience</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Full integration with Outlook contacts and activities</li> <li>Good follow-up possibilities with graphs, views and dashboards</li> <li>Quick update of progressive sales processes</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; text-decoration-line: underline;\">PROJECT MANAGEMENT</span> The module for project management in Absalon CRM gather all information at the one place, where everybody has access to the same material and receives the latest updates. By gathering all the functionality in the same place, in the CRM, you utilize already existing information about customers, contacts, and activities. <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Microsoft Dynamics CRM</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Integration with Outlook activities, track emails and other activities in your projects</li> <li>Integration to SharePoint for document management</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Absalon add-on</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Start from one of your predefined project model</li> <li>Add project activities for each unique project</li> <li>With the ability to follow the people who are relevant to the project</li> <li>Spread the responsibility on project activities and project logs</li> <li>Time reporting on projects and/or project activities</li> <li>Do follow-up on the budget and hours towards activities and timesheets</li> <li>- Analyze and visualize through views, graphs and dashboards</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">User experience</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Access to the same information with the possibility of access control through security roles</li> <li>Connect to SharePoint for an integrated experience</li> <li>Visualize to illustrate the project's success or warning signs</li> <li>Simple time reporting</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; text-decoration-line: underline;\">RESOURCE PLANNING</span> With Absalon resource planning, resources can be booked for projects in different plans. Statistics and data for the plans are clear and you can follow the progress of work. By gathering all the functionality in the same place, in the CRM, you utilize already existing information about customers, contacts, and activities. <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Microsoft Dynamics CRM</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Integration with Outlook activities, track emails and other activities in your projects</li> <li>Integration to SharePoint for document management</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Absalon add-on</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Support for multiple simultaneous resource plans with the same or different resource members</li> <li>Save time by copying a resource allocation over time</li> <li>Duplicate resource allocations for faster input</li> <li>Use the built-in graphs to follow allocations as tools to plan for the future and utilize resources maximum</li> <li>Resource allocation to projects and project activities</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">User experience</span>\r\n<ul> <li>The user interface is familiar from other parts of the CRM, instant buttons and custom components make your work easier and graphs provide an instantaneous updated picture of the resource plan.</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; text-decoration-line: underline;\">CASE MANAGEMENT</span> Case management is a major part within CRM and Absalon add-on contains additional functionality which works well with existing Microsoft Dynamics CRM components. By gathering all the functionality in the same place, in the CRM, you utilize already existing information about customers, contacts, and activities. <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Microsoft Dynamics CRM</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Follow-up on contractual commitments for SLA</li> <li>Case registration with automatic update of entitlement terms, e.g. number of cases or hours, according to agreement</li> <li>Business Process Flow with guiding steps in order to complete the support process</li> <li>Cases automatically created based on in-coming email</li> <li>Support for case management through queues, and automatic routing of cases to queues</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Absalon add-on</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Dynamic defined process for case management and follow-up. Here you can have one or more processes at the same time, to adapt the work for each unique case.</li> <li>Possibilities to do time reports on projects and/or cases</li> <li>Case management within projects</li> <li>Possibility to continuously follow up aggregated statuses of open cases through graphs, views and dashboards</li> <li>Possibility to build a knowledge database based on recurring problems</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">User experience</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Simple and easy to use web interface</li> <li>Clear responsibilities for users in the process</li> <li>Full integration with Outlook contacts and activities</li> <li>Good follow-up possibilities with graphs and views, for cases as well as users</li> <li>Possibilities for follow-up that suits your organization</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; text-decoration-line: underline;\">SERVICE MANAGEMENT</span> Microsoft Dynamics CRM has built-in support for service, which Absalon add-on has expanded with support for service plans, installation, recurring and scheduled service cases. By gathering all the functionality in the same place, in the CRM, you utilize already existing information about customers, contacts, and activities. <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Microsoft Dynamics CRM</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Case management with SLA</li> <li>Microsoft Dynamics CRM has functionality for contract management that will help you get an overview of periods, rates and currencies etc</li> <li>Integration with Outlook activities</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Absalon add-on</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Installation management for the identification of existing installations such as machinery, equipment and products at your customers</li> <li>Add and follow the installation components</li> <li>Service Plans: add installations to a service plan and get control over when and where the services will be performed</li> <li>Work on the field, on- and offline, with Absalon Service app</li> <li>Follow up the maintenance work historically and onwards</li> <li>Register service cases within service plans, for installations and users</li> <li>Create service orders after completing the work, use it for billing purposes and sign in our mobile app solution</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Microsoft add-on products for Business Intelligence</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Use Microsoft Business Intelligence, e.g. Power Pivot, to clarify the status and plan the work in the best way</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">User experience</span>\r\n<ul> <li>With an easy to use interface and great opportunities for visualization on the user level, the work can be planned in the best way to exploit the resources right and follow-up service based on contract level.</li> <li>With Absalon Service app, users can work online or offline and quickly enter new data.</li> </ul>","shortDescription":"With Absalon CRM, you have full control over your customer relationships, from marketing and sales to service and delivery.","type":null,"isRoiCalculatorAvaliable":false,"isConfiguratorAvaliable":false,"bonus":100,"usingCount":0,"sellingCount":0,"discontinued":0,"rebateForPoc":0,"rebate":0,"seo":{"title":"Absalon CRM","keywords":"with, activities, Absalon, Microsoft, management, add-on, Dynamics, project","description":"\r\nAbsalon CRM Modules:\r\n<ol> <li>Marketing</li> <li>Sales</li> <li>Project Management</li> <li>Resource Planning</li> <li>Case Management</li> <li>Service Management</li> </ol>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; text-decoration-line: underline;\">MARKETING</span>","og:title":"Absalon CRM","og:description":"\r\nAbsalon CRM Modules:\r\n<ol> <li>Marketing</li> <li>Sales</li> <li>Project Management</li> <li>Resource Planning</li> <li>Case Management</li> <li>Service Management</li> </ol>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; text-decoration-line: underline;\">MARKETING</span>","og:image":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/Absalon_CRM.jpg"},"eventUrl":"","translationId":801,"dealDetails":null,"roi":null,"price":null,"bonusForReference":null,"templateData":[],"testingArea":"","categories":[{"id":71,"title":"CRM - Customer Relationship Management","alias":"crm-customer-relationship-management","description":"<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Customer service</span> is the provision of service to customers before, during and after a purchase. The perception of success of such interactions is dependent on employees &quot;who can adjust themselves to the personality of the guest&quot;. Customer service concerns the priority an organization assigns to customer service relative to components such as product innovation and pricing. In this sense, an organization that values good customer service may spend more money in training employees than the average organization or may proactively interview customers for feedback.\r\nA <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">customer support</span> is a range of customer services to assist customers in making cost effective and correct use of a product. It includes assistance in planning, installation, training, trouble shooting, maintenance, upgrading, and disposal of a product. These services even may be done at customer's side where he/she uses the product or service. In this case it is called &quot;at home customer services&quot; or &quot;at home customer support.&quot;\r\nRegarding technology, products such as mobile phones, televisions, computers, software products or other electronic or mechanical goods, it is termed technical support. \r\nCustomer service may be provided by a person (e.g., sales and service representative), or by automated means, such as kiosks, Internet sites, and apps.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">CRM </span>(Customer Relationship Management) is an approach to manage a company's interaction with current and potential customers. It uses data analysis about customers' history with a company to improve business relationships with customers, specifically focusing on customer retention and ultimately driving sales growth.\r\nOne important aspect of the CRM approach is the systems of CRM that compile data from a range of different communication channels, including a company's website, telephone, email, live chat, marketing materials and more recently, social media. Through the CRM approach and the systems used to facilitate it, businesses learn more about their target audiences and how to best cater to their needs.\r\nCRM helps users focus on their organization’s relationships with individual people including customers, service users, colleagues, or suppliers.\r\nWhen people talk about customer relationship management system, they might mean any of three things: \r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">CRM as Technology</span>: This is a technology product, often in the cloud, that teams use to record, report and analyse interactions between the company and users. This is also called a CRM system or solution.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">CRM as a Strategy</span>: This is a business’ philosophy about how relationships with customers and potential customers should be managed.&nbsp; </li><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">CRM as a Process</span>: Think of this as a system a business adopts to nurture and manage those relationships.</li></ul>\r\n<br /><br /><br />","materialsDescription":"<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal;\">Why is CRM important?</span></h1>\r\nCRM management system enables a business to deepen its relationships with customers, service users, colleagues, partners and suppliers.\r\nForging good relationships and keeping track of prospects and customers is crucial for customer acquisition and retention, which is at the heart of a CRM’s function. You can see everything in one place — a simple, customizable dashboard that can tell you a customer’s previous history with you, the status of their orders, any outstanding customer service issues, and more.\r\nGartner predicts that by 2021, CRM technology will be the single largest revenue area of spending in enterprise software. If your business is going to last, you know that you need a strategy for the future. For forward-thinking businesses, CRM is the framework for that strategy.\r\n<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal;\">What are the benefits of CRM?</span></h1>\r\nBy collecting and organising data about customer interactions, making it accessible and actionable for all, and facilitating analysis of that data, CRM offers many benefits and advantages.<br />The benefits and advantages of CRM include:\r\n<ul><li>Enhanced contact management</li><li>Cross-team collaboration</li><li>Heightened productivity</li><li>Empowered sales management</li><li>Accurate sales forecasting</li><li>Reliable reporting</li><li>Improved sales metrics</li><li>Increased customer satisfaction and retention</li><li>Boosted marketing ROI</li><li>Enriched products and services</li></ul>\r\n<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal;\">What are the key features of most popular CRM software programs?</span></h1>\r\nWhile many CRM solutions differ in their specific value propositions — depending on your business size, priority function, or industry type — they usually share some core features. These, in fact, are the foundation of any top CRM software, without which you might end up using an inferior app or an over-rated address book. So, let’s discuss the key features you need to look for when figuring out the best CRM software for your business.\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Contact management</span>. The best CRM solutions aren’t just an address book that only organizes contact details. It manages customer data in a centralized place and gives you a 360-degree view of your customers. You should be able to organize customers’ personal information, demographics, interactions, and transactions in ways that are meaningful to your goals or processes. Moreover, a good contact management feature lets you personalize your outreach campaign. By collecting personal, social, and purchase data, it will help you to segment target audience groups in different ways.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Reporting and dashboards</span>. These features of customer relationship management allow you to use analytics to interpret customer data. Reporting is very useful if you want to consolidate disparate data and churn out insights in different visualizations. This lets you make better decisions or proactively deal with market trends and customer behavioral patterns. The more visual widgets a CRM software has, the better you can present reports. Furthermore, a best customer relationship management software will generate real-time data, making reporting more accurate and timely. Reporting also keeps you tab on sales opportunities like upsell, resell, and cross-sell, especially when integrated with e-commerce platforms.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Lead management</span>. These features let you manage leads all the way to win-loss stage. They pave a clear path to conversion, so you can quickly assess how the business is performing. One of the main three legs that comprises the best client relationship management software (the other two being contact management and reporting), lead management unburdens the sales team from follow-ups, tracking, and repetitive tasks.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Deals and tasks</span>. Deals and tasks are closely associated with leads. Deals are leads at the negotiation stage, so it’s critical to keep a close eye on their associated tasks for a higher chance of conversion.<br />CRM software tools should also let you track both deals and tasks in their respective windows or across the sales stages. Whether you’re viewing a contact or analyzing the sales pipeline, you should be able to immediately check the deal’s tasks and details. Deals and tasks should also have user permissions to protect leaks of sensitive data. Similarly, alerts are critical to tasks so deadlines are met. Notifications are usually sent via email or prominently displayed on the user’s dashboard.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Campaign management</span>. Solid CRM software will integrate this feature to enable marketing processes from outreach concept to A/B testing to deployment and to post analysis. This will allow you to sort campaigns to target segments in your contacts and define deployment strategies. You will also be able to define metrics for various channels, then plow back the insights generated by post-campaign analytics into planning more campaigns.<br />Recurring outreach efforts can also be automated. For instance, you can set to instantly appropriate content to contacts based on their interest or send tiered autoresponders based on campaign feedback.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Email management</span>. By integrating with popular email clients like Gmail and Outlook, CRM solutions can capture email messages and sort important details that can be saved in contacts or synced with leads. They can also track activities like opened emails, forwarded emails, clicked links, and downloaded files. Emails can also be qualified for prospecting.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Social media management. </span>Popular CRM systems feature an integrated social media management where you can view different social media pages from the CRM’s interface. This is a convenient way to post, reply on, and manage all your pages. Likewise, this feature gives you a better perspective on how customers are interacting with your brand. A glean of their likes and dislikes, interests, shares, and public conversations helps you to assess customer biases and preferences. Customers are also increasingly using social media to contact companies; hence, a good CRM should alert you for brand mentions.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Mobile access</span>. With more users accessing apps via mobile devices, many vendors have been prioritizing mobile-first platforms. Emergence Capital Partners study found over 300 mobile-first apps so far and CRM is definitely one their targets. Many CRM solutions have both Android and iOS apps. Mobile access works in two ways to be highly appreciated: accessing data and inputting data while on location. Field sales with the latest sales information on hand may be able to interest prospects better. Conversely, sales reps can quickly update deals across the pipeline even as they come off a client meeting.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/CRM_-_Customer_Relationship_Management.png"}],"characteristics":[],"concurentProducts":[],"jobRoles":[],"organizationalFeatures":[],"complementaryCategories":[],"solutions":[],"materials":[],"useCases":[],"best_practices":[],"values":[],"implementations":[]}],"suppliedProducts":[{"id":3593,"logoURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/microsoft.png","logo":true,"scheme":false,"title":"Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)","vendorVerified":0,"rating":"0.00","implementationsCount":0,"suppliersCount":0,"supplierPartnersCount":272,"alias":"microsoft-defender-advanced-threat-protection-atp","companyTitle":"Microsoft","companyTypes":["vendor"],"companyId":163,"companyAlias":"microsoft","description":"<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)</span> is a complete security solution.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Agentless, cloud-powered</span>\r\nNo additional deployment or infrastructure. No delays or update compatibility issues. Always up to date.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Unparalleled optics</span>\r\nBuilt into Windows 10 for deeper insights. Exchanges signals with the Microsoft Intelligent Security Graph.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Automated security</span>\r\nTake your security to a new level, by going from alert to remediation in minutes – at scale.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Synchronized defense</span>\r\nMicrosoft 365 shares detection and exploration – across devices, identities and information – to speed up response and recovery.\r\n\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Announcing Threat &amp; Vulnerability Management</span>\r\nThreat and Vulnerability Management is a new capability within Microsoft Defender ATP designed to empower security teams to discover, prioritize and remediate vulnerabilities, and misconfigurations.<br /><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Microsoft Threat Experts</span>\r\nMicrosoft Threat Experts further empowers your Security Operations Centers by providing them with deep knowledge, expert level threat monitoring, analysis, and support to identify critical threats in your unique environment.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Automation: From alert to remediation in minutes - at scale</span>\r\nAutomatically investigate alerts and remediate complex threats in minutes. Applies industry best practices and intelligent decision-making algorithms to determine whether a threat - file or fileless - is active and what action to take.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Protect your business from advanced threats</span>\r\nThrough the power of the cloud, machine learning and behavior analytics, Microsoft Defender ATP provides connected pre-breach protection.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Innovative Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)</span>\r\nCyber attacks remain a serious threat. Microsoft Defender ATP detects network attacks and data breaches, and gives you the insights and tools to close incidents quickly.","shortDescription":"Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) is a unified platform for preventative protection, post-breach detection, automated investigation, and response.","type":null,"isRoiCalculatorAvaliable":false,"isConfiguratorAvaliable":false,"bonus":100,"usingCount":12,"sellingCount":9,"discontinued":0,"rebateForPoc":0,"rebate":0,"seo":{"title":"Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)","keywords":"","description":"<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)</span> is a complete security solution.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Agentless, cloud-powered</span>\r\nNo additional deployment or infrastructure. No delays or update co","og:title":"Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)","og:description":"<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)</span> is a complete security solution.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Agentless, cloud-powered</span>\r\nNo additional deployment or infrastructure. No delays or update co","og:image":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/microsoft.png"},"eventUrl":"","translationId":3594,"dealDetails":null,"roi":null,"price":null,"bonusForReference":null,"templateData":[],"testingArea":"","categories":[{"id":838,"title":"Endpoint Detection and Response","alias":"endpoint-detection-and-response","description":"Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) is a cybersecurity technology that addresses the need for continuous monitoring and response to advanced threats. It is a subset of endpoint security technology and a critical piece of an optimal security posture. EDR differs from other endpoint protection platforms (EPP) such as antivirus (AV) and anti-malware in that its primary focus isn't to automatically stop threats in the pre-execution phase on an endpoint. Rather, EDR is focused on providing the right endpoint visibility with the right insights to help security analysts discover, investigate and respond to very advanced threats and broader attack campaigns stretching across multiple endpoints. Many EDR tools, however, combine EDR and EPP.\r\nWhile small and mid-market organizations are increasingly turning to EDR technology for more advanced endpoint protection, many lack the resources to maximize the benefits of the technology. Utilizing advanced EDR features such as forensic analysis, behavioral monitoring and artificial intelligence (AI) is labor and resource intensive, requiring the attention of dedicated security professionals.\r\nA managed endpoint security service combines the latest technology, an around-the-clock team of certified CSOC experts and up-to-the-minute industry intelligence for a cost-effective monthly subscription. Managed services can help reduce the day-to-day burden of monitoring and responding to alerts, enhance security orchestration and automation (SOAR) and improve threat hunting and incident response.","materialsDescription":"<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">What is Endpoint detection and response (EDR)?</span>\r\nEndpoint detection and response is an emerging technology that addresses the need for continuous monitoring and response to advanced threats. One could even make the argument that endpoint detection and response is a form of advanced threat protection.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What are the Key Aspects of EDR Security?</span>\r\nAccording to Gartner, effective EDR must include the following capabilities:\r\n<ul><li>Incident data search and investigation</li><li>Alert triage or suspicious activity validation</li><li>Suspicious activity detection</li><li>Threat hunting or data exploration</li><li>Stopping malicious activity</li></ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What to look for in an EDR Solution?</span>\r\nUnderstanding the key aspects of EDR and why they are important will help you better discern what to look for in a solution. It’s important to find EDR software that can provide the highest level of protection while requiring the least amount of effort and investment — adding value to your security team without draining resources. Here are the six key aspects of EDR you should look for:\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">1. Visibility:</span> Real-time visibility across all your endpoints allows you to view adversary activities, even as they attempt to breach your environment and stop them immediately.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">2. Threat Database:</span> Effective EDR requires massive amounts of telemetry collected from endpoints and enriched with context so it can be mined for signs of attack with a variety of analytic techniques.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">3. Behavioral Protection:</span> Relying solely on signature-based methods or indicators of compromise (IOCs) lead to the “silent failure” that allows data breaches to occur. Effective endpoint detection and response requires behavioral approaches that search for indicators of attack (IOAs), so you are alerted of suspicious activities before a compromise can occur.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">4. Insight and Intelligence:</span> An endpoint detection and response solution that integrates threat intelligence can provide context, including details on the attributed adversary that is attacking you or other information about the attack.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">5. Fast Response:</span> EDR that enables a fast and accurate response to incidents can stop an attack before it becomes a breach and allow your organization to get back to business quickly.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">6. Cloud-based Solution:</span> Having a cloud-based endpoint detection and response solution is the only way to ensure zero impact on endpoints while making sure capabilities such as search, analysis and investigation can be done accurately and in real time.","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/hgghghg.png"}],"characteristics":[],"concurentProducts":[],"jobRoles":[],"organizationalFeatures":[],"complementaryCategories":[],"solutions":[],"materials":[],"useCases":[],"best_practices":[],"values":[],"implementations":[]},{"id":4796,"logoURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/microsoft_scsm.png","logo":true,"scheme":false,"title":"Microsoft System Center Service Manager (SCSM)","vendorVerified":0,"rating":"0.00","implementationsCount":2,"suppliersCount":0,"supplierPartnersCount":272,"alias":"microsoft-system-center-service-manager-scsm","companyTitle":"Microsoft","companyTypes":["vendor"],"companyId":163,"companyAlias":"microsoft","description":"Microsoft System Center 2012 Service Manager (SCSM 2012) is a management product in the System Center 2012 suite that can help an enterprise automate and adapt its IT service management. SCSM includes built-in processes that address situations enterprises will come across, such as changing control, managing assets' lifecycles and resolving problems and incidents as they occur. The SCSM 2012 application consists of three tiers: a console, a data access module and a database.<br />Enterprises must take two important factors into consideration before deploying SCSM 2012. First, they must create and identify a domain account to use when setting up Service Manager. Second, they must create a user group in Active Directory Domain Services.<br />There a number of ways to deploy SCSM 2012, but there are three deployment options that receive the most attention: one virtual computer and one physical computer; two computers to host the management server and database; and four computers to host the management server and database.<br /><br />","shortDescription":"Microsoft System Center Service Manager is designed to improve and simplify IT support operations.","type":null,"isRoiCalculatorAvaliable":false,"isConfiguratorAvaliable":false,"bonus":100,"usingCount":7,"sellingCount":13,"discontinued":0,"rebateForPoc":0,"rebate":0,"seo":{"title":"Microsoft System Center Service Manager (SCSM)","keywords":"","description":"Microsoft System Center 2012 Service Manager (SCSM 2012) is a management product in the System Center 2012 suite that can help an enterprise automate and adapt its IT service management. SCSM includes built-in processes that address situations enterprises will","og:title":"Microsoft System Center Service Manager (SCSM)","og:description":"Microsoft System Center 2012 Service Manager (SCSM 2012) is a management product in the System Center 2012 suite that can help an enterprise automate and adapt its IT service management. SCSM includes built-in processes that address situations enterprises will","og:image":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/microsoft_scsm.png"},"eventUrl":"","translationId":4797,"dealDetails":null,"roi":null,"price":null,"bonusForReference":null,"templateData":[],"testingArea":"","categories":[{"id":34,"title":"ITSM - IT Service Management","alias":"itsm-it-service-management","description":"<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">IT service management (ITSM)</span> is the process of designing, delivering, managing, and improving the IT services an organization provides to its end users. ITSM is focused on aligning IT processes and services with business objectives to help an organization grow.\r\nITSM positions IT services as the key means of delivering and obtaining value, where an internal or external IT service provider works with business customers, at the same time taking responsibility for the associated costs and risks. ITSM works across the whole lifecycle of a service, from the original strategy, through design, transition and into live operation.\r\nTo ensure sustainable quality of IT services, ITSM establishes a set of practices, or processes, constituting a service management system. There are industrial, national and international standards for IT service management solutions, setting up requirements and good practices for the management system. \r\nITSM system is based on a set of principles, such as focusing on value and continual improvement. It is not just a set of processes – it is a cultural mindset to ensure that the desired outcome for the business is achieved. \r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library)</span> is a framework of best practices and recommendations for managing an organization's IT operations and services. IT service management processes, when built based on the ITIL framework, pave the way for better IT service operations management and improved business. To summarize, ITIL is a set of guidelines for effective IT service management best practices. ITIL has evolved beyond the delivery of services to providing end-to-end value delivery. The focus is now on the co-creation of value through service relationships. \r\n<p class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">ITSM processes typically include five stages, all based on the ITIL framework:</span></p>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">ITSM strategy.</span> This stage forms the foundation or the framework of an organization's ITSM process building. It involves defining the services that the organization will offer, strategically planning processes, and recognizing and developing the required assets to keep processes moving. \r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Service design.</span> This stage's main aim is planning and designing the IT services the organization offers to meet business demands. It involves creating and designing new services as well as assessing current services and making relevant improvements.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Service transition.</span> Once the designs for IT services and their processes have been finalized, it's important to build them and test them out to ensure that processes flow. IT teams need to ensure that the designs don't disrupt services in any way, especially when existing IT service processes are upgraded or redesigned. This calls for change management, evaluation, and risk management. \r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Service operation. </span>This phase involves implementing the tried and tested new or modified designs in a live environment. While in this stage, the processes have already been tested and the issues fixed, but new processes are bound to have hiccups—especially when customers start using the services. \r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Continual service improvement (CSI).</span> Implementing IT processes successfully shouldn't be the final stage in any organization. There's always room for improvement and new development based on issues that pop up, customer needs and demands, and user feedback.\r\n\r\n","materialsDescription":"<h1 class=\"align-center\">Benefits of efficient ITSM processes</h1>\r\nIrrespective of the size of business, every organization is involved in IT service management in some way. ITSM ensures that incidents, service requests, problems, changes, and IT assets—in addition to other aspects of IT services—are managed in a streamlined way.\r\nIT teams in your organization can employ various workflows and best practices in ITSM, as outlined in ITIL. Effective IT service management can have positive effects on an IT organization's overall function.\r\nHere are the 10 key benefits of ITSM:\r\n<ul><li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Lower costs for IT operations</li><li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Higher returns on IT investments</li><li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Minimal service outages</li><li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Ability to establish well-defined, repeatable, and manageable IT processes</li><li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Efficient analysis of IT problems to reduce repeat incidents</li><li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Improved efficiency of IT help desk teams</li><li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Well-defined roles and responsibilities</li><li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Clear expectations on service levels and service availability</li><li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Risk-free implementation of IT changes</li><li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Better transparency into IT processes and services</li></ul>\r\n<h1 class=\"align-center\">How to choose an ITSM tool?</h1>\r\nWith a competent IT service management goal in mind, it's important to invest in a service desk solution that caters to your business needs. It goes without saying, with more than 150 service desk tools to choose from, selecting the right one is easier said than done. Here are a few things to keep in mind when choosing an ITSM products:\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Identify key processes and their dependencies. </span>Based on business goals, decide which key ITSM processes need to be implemented and chart out the integrations that need to be established to achieve those goals. \r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Consult with ITSM experts.</span> Participate in business expos, webinars, demos, etc., and educate yourself about the various options that are available in the market. Reports from expert analysts such as Gartner and Forrester are particularly useful as they include reviews of almost every solution, ranked based on multiple criteria.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Choose a deployment option.</span> Every business has a different IT infrastructure model. Selecting an on-premises or software as a service (SaaS IT service management) tool depends on whether your business prefers to host its applications and data on its own servers or use a public or private cloud.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Plan ahead for the future.</span> Although it's important to consider the &quot;needs&quot; primarily, you shouldn't rule out the secondary or luxury capabilities. If the ITSM tool doesn't have the potential to adapt to your needs as your organization grows, it can pull you back from progressing. Draw a clear picture of where your business is headed and choose an service ITSM that is flexible and technology-driven.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Don't stop with the capabilities of the ITSM tool.</span> It might be tempting to assess an ITSM tool based on its capabilities and features but it's important to evaluate the vendor of the tool. A good IT support team, and a vendor that is endorsed for their customer-vendor relationship can take your IT services far. Check Gartner's magic quadrant and other analyst reports, along with product and support reviews to ensure that the said tool provides good customer support.","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/icon_ITSM.png"}],"characteristics":[],"concurentProducts":[],"jobRoles":[],"organizationalFeatures":[],"complementaryCategories":[],"solutions":[],"materials":[],"useCases":[],"best_practices":[],"values":[],"implementations":[]},{"id":4842,"logoURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/orchestrator_20121.jpg","logo":true,"scheme":false,"title":"Microsoft System Center Orchestrator","vendorVerified":0,"rating":"0.00","implementationsCount":1,"suppliersCount":0,"supplierPartnersCount":272,"alias":"microsoft-system-center-orchestrator","companyTitle":"Microsoft","companyTypes":["vendor"],"companyId":163,"companyAlias":"microsoft","description":"Microsoft System Center Orchestrator is a workflow automation software product that allows administrators to automate the monitoring and deployment of data center resources.<br /><br />Microsoft System Center Orchestrator was introduced as part of the Microsoft System Center 2012 suite as a rebranding of Microsoft’s previous workflow automation software, Opalis vNext. Orchestrator uses a drag and drop graphical interface to allow admins to define run books. Orchestrator translates these visual representations into .NET scripts, PowerShell or SSH commands to automate workflows. It is capable of managing multiple operating systems and can also handle VMware- and Citrix-based workflows.<br /><br />Microsoft offers add-ons for System Center Orchestrator that extend its functionality, including the Microsoft System Center 2012 Orchestrator Integration Toolkit and the Microsoft System Center 2012 Orchestrator Integration Pack.","shortDescription":"Microsoft System Center Orchestrator is a workflow automation software product that allows administrators to automate the monitoring and deployment of data center resources.","type":null,"isRoiCalculatorAvaliable":false,"isConfiguratorAvaliable":false,"bonus":100,"usingCount":20,"sellingCount":13,"discontinued":0,"rebateForPoc":0,"rebate":0,"seo":{"title":"Microsoft System Center Orchestrator","keywords":"","description":"Microsoft System Center Orchestrator is a workflow automation software product that allows administrators to automate the monitoring and deployment of data center resources.<br /><br />Microsoft System Center Orchestrator was introduced as part of the Microsof","og:title":"Microsoft System Center Orchestrator","og:description":"Microsoft System Center Orchestrator is a workflow automation software product that allows administrators to automate the monitoring and deployment of data center resources.<br /><br />Microsoft System Center Orchestrator was introduced as part of the Microsof","og:image":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/orchestrator_20121.jpg"},"eventUrl":"","translationId":4843,"dealDetails":null,"roi":null,"price":null,"bonusForReference":null,"templateData":[],"testingArea":"","categories":[{"id":34,"title":"ITSM - IT Service Management","alias":"itsm-it-service-management","description":"<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">IT service management (ITSM)</span> is the process of designing, delivering, managing, and improving the IT services an organization provides to its end users. ITSM is focused on aligning IT processes and services with business objectives to help an organization grow.\r\nITSM positions IT services as the key means of delivering and obtaining value, where an internal or external IT service provider works with business customers, at the same time taking responsibility for the associated costs and risks. ITSM works across the whole lifecycle of a service, from the original strategy, through design, transition and into live operation.\r\nTo ensure sustainable quality of IT services, ITSM establishes a set of practices, or processes, constituting a service management system. There are industrial, national and international standards for IT service management solutions, setting up requirements and good practices for the management system. \r\nITSM system is based on a set of principles, such as focusing on value and continual improvement. It is not just a set of processes – it is a cultural mindset to ensure that the desired outcome for the business is achieved. \r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library)</span> is a framework of best practices and recommendations for managing an organization's IT operations and services. IT service management processes, when built based on the ITIL framework, pave the way for better IT service operations management and improved business. To summarize, ITIL is a set of guidelines for effective IT service management best practices. ITIL has evolved beyond the delivery of services to providing end-to-end value delivery. The focus is now on the co-creation of value through service relationships. \r\n<p class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">ITSM processes typically include five stages, all based on the ITIL framework:</span></p>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">ITSM strategy.</span> This stage forms the foundation or the framework of an organization's ITSM process building. It involves defining the services that the organization will offer, strategically planning processes, and recognizing and developing the required assets to keep processes moving. \r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Service design.</span> This stage's main aim is planning and designing the IT services the organization offers to meet business demands. It involves creating and designing new services as well as assessing current services and making relevant improvements.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Service transition.</span> Once the designs for IT services and their processes have been finalized, it's important to build them and test them out to ensure that processes flow. IT teams need to ensure that the designs don't disrupt services in any way, especially when existing IT service processes are upgraded or redesigned. This calls for change management, evaluation, and risk management. \r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Service operation. </span>This phase involves implementing the tried and tested new or modified designs in a live environment. While in this stage, the processes have already been tested and the issues fixed, but new processes are bound to have hiccups—especially when customers start using the services. \r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Continual service improvement (CSI).</span> Implementing IT processes successfully shouldn't be the final stage in any organization. There's always room for improvement and new development based on issues that pop up, customer needs and demands, and user feedback.\r\n\r\n","materialsDescription":"<h1 class=\"align-center\">Benefits of efficient ITSM processes</h1>\r\nIrrespective of the size of business, every organization is involved in IT service management in some way. ITSM ensures that incidents, service requests, problems, changes, and IT assets—in addition to other aspects of IT services—are managed in a streamlined way.\r\nIT teams in your organization can employ various workflows and best practices in ITSM, as outlined in ITIL. Effective IT service management can have positive effects on an IT organization's overall function.\r\nHere are the 10 key benefits of ITSM:\r\n<ul><li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Lower costs for IT operations</li><li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Higher returns on IT investments</li><li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Minimal service outages</li><li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Ability to establish well-defined, repeatable, and manageable IT processes</li><li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Efficient analysis of IT problems to reduce repeat incidents</li><li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Improved efficiency of IT help desk teams</li><li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Well-defined roles and responsibilities</li><li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Clear expectations on service levels and service availability</li><li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Risk-free implementation of IT changes</li><li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Better transparency into IT processes and services</li></ul>\r\n<h1 class=\"align-center\">How to choose an ITSM tool?</h1>\r\nWith a competent IT service management goal in mind, it's important to invest in a service desk solution that caters to your business needs. It goes without saying, with more than 150 service desk tools to choose from, selecting the right one is easier said than done. Here are a few things to keep in mind when choosing an ITSM products:\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Identify key processes and their dependencies. </span>Based on business goals, decide which key ITSM processes need to be implemented and chart out the integrations that need to be established to achieve those goals. \r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Consult with ITSM experts.</span> Participate in business expos, webinars, demos, etc., and educate yourself about the various options that are available in the market. Reports from expert analysts such as Gartner and Forrester are particularly useful as they include reviews of almost every solution, ranked based on multiple criteria.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Choose a deployment option.</span> Every business has a different IT infrastructure model. Selecting an on-premises or software as a service (SaaS IT service management) tool depends on whether your business prefers to host its applications and data on its own servers or use a public or private cloud.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Plan ahead for the future.</span> Although it's important to consider the &quot;needs&quot; primarily, you shouldn't rule out the secondary or luxury capabilities. If the ITSM tool doesn't have the potential to adapt to your needs as your organization grows, it can pull you back from progressing. Draw a clear picture of where your business is headed and choose an service ITSM that is flexible and technology-driven.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Don't stop with the capabilities of the ITSM tool.</span> It might be tempting to assess an ITSM tool based on its capabilities and features but it's important to evaluate the vendor of the tool. A good IT support team, and a vendor that is endorsed for their customer-vendor relationship can take your IT services far. Check Gartner's magic quadrant and other analyst reports, along with product and support reviews to ensure that the said tool provides good customer support.","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/icon_ITSM.png"}],"characteristics":[],"concurentProducts":[],"jobRoles":[],"organizationalFeatures":[],"complementaryCategories":[],"solutions":[],"materials":[],"useCases":[],"best_practices":[],"values":[],"implementations":[]},{"id":799,"logoURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/Absalon_CRM.jpg","logo":true,"scheme":false,"title":"Absalon CRM for Consumer Goods","vendorVerified":0,"rating":"1.40","implementationsCount":0,"suppliersCount":0,"supplierPartnersCount":1,"alias":"absalon-crm-for-consumer-goods","companyTitle":"Absalon International","companyTypes":["supplier","vendor"],"companyId":3711,"companyAlias":"absalon-international","description":"<span style=\"font-weight: bold; text-decoration-line: underline;\">Absalon Consumer Goods – For the Sales Manager</span> Absalon CRM for consumer goods is based on the most widely used processes in sales within the industry. The solution will help the company strengthen its brands while minimizing the time spent on administration. <span style=\"font-weight: bold; text-decoration-line: underline;\">Absalon Consumer Goods – For the Sales Rep</span> Sales representatives’ main focus is to spread information about the various products and brands that their company offers the market. An important task is to report received feedback acquired during the meeting so that the brand can be strengthen even further in the future. With Absalon add-on, we combine a solid database of CRM with efficient processes to report sales meeting, limiting the time spent on administration, and all this is achievable through mobile devices and computers. <span style=\"font-weight: bold; text-decoration-line: underline;\">Absalon Consumer Goods – For the Sales Manager</span> <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Microsoft Dynamics CRM</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Manage products, product groups, brands, price lists and discounts</li> <li>Use the built-in marketing lists to reach accounts and contacts</li> <li>Take advantage of Microsoft CRM dashboards, views and charts to track the progress of sales work day by day</li> <li>With Microsoft Social Engagement, you can monitor social media activities and gather information based on keywords, such as the company's brands</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Absalon add-on data setup</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Organize and guide your sales force by creating business plans, t&nbsp; erritory plans and action plans</li> <li>Prepare materials for each brand so that the sales team works effectively at each sales meeting, and report back meetings directly</li> <li>Understand how the business develops by following up on the data that the sales representative reports after meetings</li> <li>Add up the presentation materials, CLM, that the sales representative can present on their mobile devices or laptops, at sales meetings. Smoothly report feedback back into the system immediately after the meeting</li> <li>Keep track of the distribution of your products on the shelves at your customers</li> <li>Track awareness for your brands at organizations and contacts</li> <li>Manage expenses and product samples to customers</li> <li>Use Absalon add-on to create events and invite contacts</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Absalon add-on facilitates for the sales reps</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Plan a week effectively using Absalon Sales Cockpit as a visual tool for sales meetings&nbsp;</li> <li>Find your way to customers with help of the map of Absalon add-on that creates the best route</li> <li>Plan for distribution materials and samples ahead and check so sales representatives have what they need for the week</li> <li>Set up the data so that the sales process is made more uniform and streamlined, and time spent on administration is limited</li> <li>Use pre-defined messages, feedback and CLM for each brand</li> <li>The recurring user interface for reporting sales meetings accelerates the reporting process</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; text-decoration-line: underline;\">Absalon Consumer Goods – For the Sales Rep</span> <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Microsoft Dynamics CRM</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Use the built in marketing lists to contact organizations and contact persons with similar features</li> <li>Microsoft CRM dashboards, views and charts helps you following the sales work day by day and see what needs to achieve to reach the set goals</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Absalon add-on data setup</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Use the built-in map function to locate your contacts and plan the best possible route&nbsp;</li> <li>Plan your week using Absalon Sales Cockpit, which gives you a good overview of the week's various sales meetings</li> <li>Evaluate how your message has been received by the various contact persons</li> <li>Set up action plans with predefined messages and feedback, CLM and hand-out materials</li> <li>Copy an action plan and recycle the data that is already available in the system</li> <li>Create sales meetings on an action plan to auto generate the data that you will use in your sales meeting, and report the meeting in the system afterwards</li> <li>Check contribution margin ratio for each contact in your plan so that you reach your goals</li> <li>Invite your contacts to events with a few simple steps</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Consumer Goods Sales Rep App</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Absalon Sales Rep App works both online and offline, which allows you to report the meetings no matter where you are</li> <li>The user experiences that the app is easy to understand and easy to use</li> <li>Filtering data in the app to match the needs you have as a sales rep and makes it easier to report meetings</li> <li>Get the contact person's signature on the location of the samples that you handed out</li> <li>Switch between the laptop and the app to find the most efficient way to work</li> </ul>","shortDescription":"Absalon CRM for consumer goods is based on the most widely used processes in sales within the industry. The solution will help the company strengthen its brands while minimizing the time spent on administration.","type":null,"isRoiCalculatorAvaliable":false,"isConfiguratorAvaliable":false,"bonus":100,"usingCount":0,"sellingCount":0,"discontinued":0,"rebateForPoc":0,"rebate":0,"seo":{"title":"Absalon CRM for Consumer Goods","keywords":"sales, Absalon, that, your, Sales, meetings, data, report","description":"<span style=\"font-weight: bold; text-decoration-line: underline;\">Absalon Consumer Goods – For the Sales Manager</span> Absalon CRM for consumer goods is based on the most widely used processes in sales within the industry. The solution will help the company s","og:title":"Absalon CRM for Consumer Goods","og:description":"<span style=\"font-weight: bold; text-decoration-line: underline;\">Absalon Consumer Goods – For the Sales Manager</span> Absalon CRM for consumer goods is based on the most widely used processes in sales within the industry. The solution will help the company s","og:image":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/Absalon_CRM.jpg"},"eventUrl":"","translationId":799,"dealDetails":null,"roi":null,"price":null,"bonusForReference":null,"templateData":[],"testingArea":"","categories":[{"id":71,"title":"CRM - Customer Relationship Management","alias":"crm-customer-relationship-management","description":"<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Customer service</span> is the provision of service to customers before, during and after a purchase. The perception of success of such interactions is dependent on employees &quot;who can adjust themselves to the personality of the guest&quot;. Customer service concerns the priority an organization assigns to customer service relative to components such as product innovation and pricing. In this sense, an organization that values good customer service may spend more money in training employees than the average organization or may proactively interview customers for feedback.\r\nA <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">customer support</span> is a range of customer services to assist customers in making cost effective and correct use of a product. It includes assistance in planning, installation, training, trouble shooting, maintenance, upgrading, and disposal of a product. These services even may be done at customer's side where he/she uses the product or service. In this case it is called &quot;at home customer services&quot; or &quot;at home customer support.&quot;\r\nRegarding technology, products such as mobile phones, televisions, computers, software products or other electronic or mechanical goods, it is termed technical support. \r\nCustomer service may be provided by a person (e.g., sales and service representative), or by automated means, such as kiosks, Internet sites, and apps.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">CRM </span>(Customer Relationship Management) is an approach to manage a company's interaction with current and potential customers. It uses data analysis about customers' history with a company to improve business relationships with customers, specifically focusing on customer retention and ultimately driving sales growth.\r\nOne important aspect of the CRM approach is the systems of CRM that compile data from a range of different communication channels, including a company's website, telephone, email, live chat, marketing materials and more recently, social media. Through the CRM approach and the systems used to facilitate it, businesses learn more about their target audiences and how to best cater to their needs.\r\nCRM helps users focus on their organization’s relationships with individual people including customers, service users, colleagues, or suppliers.\r\nWhen people talk about customer relationship management system, they might mean any of three things: \r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">CRM as Technology</span>: This is a technology product, often in the cloud, that teams use to record, report and analyse interactions between the company and users. This is also called a CRM system or solution.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">CRM as a Strategy</span>: This is a business’ philosophy about how relationships with customers and potential customers should be managed.&nbsp; </li><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">CRM as a Process</span>: Think of this as a system a business adopts to nurture and manage those relationships.</li></ul>\r\n<br /><br /><br />","materialsDescription":"<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal;\">Why is CRM important?</span></h1>\r\nCRM management system enables a business to deepen its relationships with customers, service users, colleagues, partners and suppliers.\r\nForging good relationships and keeping track of prospects and customers is crucial for customer acquisition and retention, which is at the heart of a CRM’s function. You can see everything in one place — a simple, customizable dashboard that can tell you a customer’s previous history with you, the status of their orders, any outstanding customer service issues, and more.\r\nGartner predicts that by 2021, CRM technology will be the single largest revenue area of spending in enterprise software. If your business is going to last, you know that you need a strategy for the future. For forward-thinking businesses, CRM is the framework for that strategy.\r\n<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal;\">What are the benefits of CRM?</span></h1>\r\nBy collecting and organising data about customer interactions, making it accessible and actionable for all, and facilitating analysis of that data, CRM offers many benefits and advantages.<br />The benefits and advantages of CRM include:\r\n<ul><li>Enhanced contact management</li><li>Cross-team collaboration</li><li>Heightened productivity</li><li>Empowered sales management</li><li>Accurate sales forecasting</li><li>Reliable reporting</li><li>Improved sales metrics</li><li>Increased customer satisfaction and retention</li><li>Boosted marketing ROI</li><li>Enriched products and services</li></ul>\r\n<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal;\">What are the key features of most popular CRM software programs?</span></h1>\r\nWhile many CRM solutions differ in their specific value propositions — depending on your business size, priority function, or industry type — they usually share some core features. These, in fact, are the foundation of any top CRM software, without which you might end up using an inferior app or an over-rated address book. So, let’s discuss the key features you need to look for when figuring out the best CRM software for your business.\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Contact management</span>. The best CRM solutions aren’t just an address book that only organizes contact details. It manages customer data in a centralized place and gives you a 360-degree view of your customers. You should be able to organize customers’ personal information, demographics, interactions, and transactions in ways that are meaningful to your goals or processes. Moreover, a good contact management feature lets you personalize your outreach campaign. By collecting personal, social, and purchase data, it will help you to segment target audience groups in different ways.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Reporting and dashboards</span>. These features of customer relationship management allow you to use analytics to interpret customer data. Reporting is very useful if you want to consolidate disparate data and churn out insights in different visualizations. This lets you make better decisions or proactively deal with market trends and customer behavioral patterns. The more visual widgets a CRM software has, the better you can present reports. Furthermore, a best customer relationship management software will generate real-time data, making reporting more accurate and timely. Reporting also keeps you tab on sales opportunities like upsell, resell, and cross-sell, especially when integrated with e-commerce platforms.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Lead management</span>. These features let you manage leads all the way to win-loss stage. They pave a clear path to conversion, so you can quickly assess how the business is performing. One of the main three legs that comprises the best client relationship management software (the other two being contact management and reporting), lead management unburdens the sales team from follow-ups, tracking, and repetitive tasks.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Deals and tasks</span>. Deals and tasks are closely associated with leads. Deals are leads at the negotiation stage, so it’s critical to keep a close eye on their associated tasks for a higher chance of conversion.<br />CRM software tools should also let you track both deals and tasks in their respective windows or across the sales stages. Whether you’re viewing a contact or analyzing the sales pipeline, you should be able to immediately check the deal’s tasks and details. Deals and tasks should also have user permissions to protect leaks of sensitive data. Similarly, alerts are critical to tasks so deadlines are met. Notifications are usually sent via email or prominently displayed on the user’s dashboard.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Campaign management</span>. Solid CRM software will integrate this feature to enable marketing processes from outreach concept to A/B testing to deployment and to post analysis. This will allow you to sort campaigns to target segments in your contacts and define deployment strategies. You will also be able to define metrics for various channels, then plow back the insights generated by post-campaign analytics into planning more campaigns.<br />Recurring outreach efforts can also be automated. For instance, you can set to instantly appropriate content to contacts based on their interest or send tiered autoresponders based on campaign feedback.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Email management</span>. By integrating with popular email clients like Gmail and Outlook, CRM solutions can capture email messages and sort important details that can be saved in contacts or synced with leads. They can also track activities like opened emails, forwarded emails, clicked links, and downloaded files. Emails can also be qualified for prospecting.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Social media management. </span>Popular CRM systems feature an integrated social media management where you can view different social media pages from the CRM’s interface. This is a convenient way to post, reply on, and manage all your pages. Likewise, this feature gives you a better perspective on how customers are interacting with your brand. A glean of their likes and dislikes, interests, shares, and public conversations helps you to assess customer biases and preferences. Customers are also increasingly using social media to contact companies; hence, a good CRM should alert you for brand mentions.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Mobile access</span>. With more users accessing apps via mobile devices, many vendors have been prioritizing mobile-first platforms. Emergence Capital Partners study found over 300 mobile-first apps so far and CRM is definitely one their targets. Many CRM solutions have both Android and iOS apps. Mobile access works in two ways to be highly appreciated: accessing data and inputting data while on location. Field sales with the latest sales information on hand may be able to interest prospects better. Conversely, sales reps can quickly update deals across the pipeline even as they come off a client meeting.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/CRM_-_Customer_Relationship_Management.png"},{"id":337,"title":"Sales","alias":"sales","description":" Sales are activities related to selling or the number of goods or services sold in a given targeted time period.\r\nThe seller, or the provider of the goods or services, completes a sale in response to an acquisition, appropriation, requisition, or a direct interaction with the buyer at the point of sale. There is a passing of title (property or ownership) of the item, and the settlement of a price, in which agreement is reached on a price for which transfer of ownership of the item will occur. The seller, not the purchaser, typically executes the sale and it may be completed prior to the obligation of payment. In the case of indirect interaction, a person who sells goods or service on behalf of the owner is known as a salesman or saleswoman or salesperson, but this often refers to someone selling goods in a store/shop, in which case other terms are also common, including salesclerk, shop assistant, and retail clerk.\r\nIn common law countries, sales are governed generally by the common law and commercial codes. In the United States, the laws governing sales of goods are somewhat uniform to the extent that most jurisdictions have adopted Article 2 of the Uniform Commercial Code, albeit with some non-uniform variations.\r\nA person or organization expressing an interest in acquiring the offered item of value is referred to as a potential buyer, prospective customer, or prospect. Buying and selling are understood to be two sides of the same &quot;coin&quot; or transaction. Both seller and buyer engage in a process of negotiation to consummate the exchange of values. The exchange, or selling, process has implied rules and identifiable stages. It is implied that the selling process will proceed fairly and ethically so that the parties end up nearly equally rewarded. The stages of selling, and buying, involve getting acquainted, assessing each party's need for the other's item of value, and determining if the values to be exchanged are equivalent or nearly so, or, in buyer's terms, &quot;worth the price&quot;. Sometimes, sellers have to use their own experiences when selling products with appropriate discounts.\r\nAlthough the skills required are different, from a management viewpoint, sales is a part of marketing. Sales often form a separate grouping in a corporate structure, employing separate specialist operatives known as salespersons (singular: salesperson). Selling is considered by many to be a sort of persuading &quot;art&quot;. Contrary to popular belief, the methodological approach of selling refers to a systematic process of repetitive and measurable milestones, by which a salesman relates his or her offering of a product or service in return enabling the buyer to achieve their goal in an economic way.","materialsDescription":" <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What's the Difference Between Sales and Marketing?</span>\r\nSales and Marketing: two terms we often hear together when working with mid-size companies. In some ways, this is logical because the two need to work together. But in fact, Sales and Marketing are two very different functions and require very different skills.\r\nBusiness leaders know what Operations are; they make stuff. They know what Accounting is; they record and control the money. And they know what Sales do; they sell stuff. So if you are not making stuff, selling stuff, or recording the money—what is marketing and why do you need it?\r\nWhat's the difference between Sales and Marketing? To answer this question, let's define what Sales and Marketing are separately and how they support one another.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic;\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What is Marketing? Aligning with Customers, Now and for the Future</span></span>\r\nA key job of Marketing is to understand the marketplace from the perspective of the customer looking back towards the company and helping lead the company where it should be in the future. Marketing’s job is to direct the organization toward the segments, or groups of customers and channels where the company can profitably compete. It should help the organization see how it needs to modify its product offerings, pricing, and communication so that it meets the needs of the distribution channel or end customers.\r\nMarketing also needs to convert the market understanding into tools and tactics to attract the market, build (often digital) relationships, and develop leads. Without Sales, Marketing efforts run short. Marketing directs Sales as to where they should be hunting and what ammo to use. Note, however, that if Marketing becomes a sales support function focused only on the now, the future can become lost.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic;\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Without Marketing, Sales Suffers</span></span>\r\nNot even the best hunter can bring home dinner if they are shooting blanks at decoys. Markets are constantly changing. The job of marketing is to stay ahead of the changes and help the hunters see where they should be hunting and provide them with the right ammunition. If Marketing is only focused on delivering the ammunition for today, nobody will see where the industry is moving or where the company needs to hunt next. This limits growth not only for Sales and Marketing but also for your entire organization.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic;\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Can You be Both Sales and Marketing?</span></span>\r\nIn all my years, working for companies that ranged from Fortune 100 to mid-size companies I have never met anyone who was really good at both sales and marketing. I have held the title of VP of Sales and Marketing, managing a 500 person sales and merchandising force. I was really a marketing person with sales authority. The skills required to focus on the now and the push of sales are different. In many ways, they are contrary to the skills of looking to the future and the customer perspective of marketing.\r\nEvery Sales organization feels they have a good understanding of their customers. But every Sales conversation with a customer has a sales transaction lurking in the background. Therefore, customers can never be completely open about their needs and want when talking to a sales person.\r\nFor a company to really grow, someone must have the job of looking out the window towards where the company needs to go in the future. For many companies, this is the job of the CEO and Sales hires someone to do some sales support and gives them a marketing title. But as companies grow, the job of CEO starts to become a full-time job in itself and the strategic role of Marketing gets short-changed. A study of mid-size companies by the University of Texas showed that companies that separated the roles of Marketing and Sales were much more likely to grow faster than the industry average.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic;\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Sales and Marketing: Today and the Future</span></span>\r\nSales need to be focused on the now. You can’t run a company unless your sales team is focused on bringing in today’s business. But you can’t really ask your Sales leaders where the company should go next and to develop the 18-month plan to get there without losing focus on today’s revenue. Besides, if your sales executive was really good at developing future-focused business strategies and tying that strategy to the plans and tools of marketing to make it happen, they would be a marketing person and not a now-focused sales person.","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/icon_Sales.png"},{"id":339,"title":"Marketing","alias":"marketing","description":" Marketing is the study and management of exchange relationships. It is the business process of creating relationships with and satisfying customers. Because marketing is used to attract customers, it is one of the primary components of business management and commerce. Marketers can direct product to other businesses (B2B marketing) or directly to consumers (B2C marketing).\r\nRegardless of who is being marketed to, several factors, including the perspective the marketers will use. These market orientations determine how marketers will approach the planning stage of marketing. This leads into the marketing mix, which outlines the specifics of the product and how it will be sold. This can in turn, be affected by the environment surrounding the product, the results of marketing research and market research, and the characteristics of the product's target market.\r\nOnce these factors are determined, marketers must then decide what methods will be used to market the product. This decision is based on the factors analyzed in the planning stage as well as where the product is in the product life cycle.\r\nMarketing is defined by the American Marketing Association as &quot;the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large&quot;. The term developed from the original meaning which referred literally to going to market with goods for sale. From a sales process engineering perspective, marketing is &quot;a set of processes that are interconnected and interdependent with other functions of a business aimed at achieving customer interest and satisfaction&quot;.\r\nPhilip Kotler defined marketing as &quot;Satisfying needs and wants through an exchange process&quot;, and a decade later defines it as “a social and managerial process by which individuals and groups obtain what they want and need through creating, offering and exchanging products of value with others.”\r\nThe Chartered Institute of Marketing defines marketing as &quot;the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably&quot;. A similar concept is the value-based marketing which states the role of marketing to contribute to increasing shareholder value. In this context, marketing can be defined as &quot;the management process that seeks to maximise returns to shareholders by developing relationships with valued customers and creating a competitive advantage&quot;.\r\nIn the past, marketing practice tended to be seen as a creative industry, which included advertising, distribution and selling. However, because the academic study of marketing makes extensive use of social sciences, psychology, sociology, mathematics, economics, anthropology and neuroscience, the profession is now widely recognized as a science, allowing numerous universities to offer Master-of-Science (MSc) programs.\r\nThe process of marketing is that of bringing a product to market, which includes these steps: broad market research; market targeting and market segmentation; determining distribution, pricing and promotion strategies; developing a communications strategy; budgeting; and visioning long-term market development goals. Many parts of the marketing process (e.g. product design, art director, brand management, advertising, inbound marketing, copywriting etc.) involve use of the creative arts.","materialsDescription":"<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">What the differences between B2B and B2C Marketing?</span>\r\nThe different goals of B2B and B2C marketing lead to differences in the B2B and B2C markets. The main differences in these markets are demand, purchasing volume, amount of customers, customer concentration, distribution, buying nature, buying influences, negotiations, reciprocity, leasing and promotional methods.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \">Demand:</span> B2B demand is derived because businesses buy products based on how much demand there is for the final consumer product. Businesses buy products based on customer's wants and needs. B2C demand is primarily because customers buy products based on their own wants and needs.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \">Purchasing Volume:</span> Businesses buy products in large volumes to distribute to consumers. Consumers buy products in smaller volumes suitable for personal use.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \">Amount of Customers:</span> There are relatively fewer businesses to market to than direct consumers.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \">Customer Concentration:</span> Businesses that specialize in a particular market tend to be geographically concentrated while customers that buy products from these businesses are not concentrated.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \">Distribution:</span> B2B products pass directly from the producer of the product to the business while B2C products must additionally go through a wholesaler or retailer.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \">Buying Nature:</span> B2B purchasing is a formal process done by professional buyers and sellers while B2C purchasing is informal.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \">Buying Influences:</span> B2B purchasing is influenced by multiple people in various departments such as quality control, accounting, and logistics while B2C marketing is only influenced by the person making the purchase and possibly a few others.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \">Negotiations:</span> In B2B marketing, negotiating for lower prices or added benefits is commonly accepted while in B2C marketing (particularly in Western cultures) prices are fixed.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \">Reciprocity:</span> Businesses tend to buy from businesses they sell to. For example, a business that sells printer ink is more likely to buy office chairs from a supplier that buys the business's printer ink. In B2C marketing, this does not occur because consumers are not also selling products.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \">Leasing:</span> Businesses tend to lease expensive items while consumers tend to save up to buy expensive items.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \">Promotional Methods:</span> In B2B marketing, the most common promotional method is personal selling. B2C marketing mostly uses sales promotion, public relations, advertising, and social media.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">What are marketing orientations?</span>\r\nA marketing orientation has been defined as a &quot;philosophy of business management.&quot; or &quot;a corporate state of mind&quot; or as an &quot;organization[al] culture&quot;. Although scholars continue to debate the precise nature of specific orientations that inform marketing practice, the most commonly cited orientations are as follows:\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Product</span></span>\r\nA firm employing a product orientation is mainly concerned with the quality of its product. A product orientation is based on the assumption that all things being equal, consumers will purchase products of superior quality. The approach is most effective when the firm has deep insights into customer needs and desires as derived from research and/or intuition and understands consumer's quality expectations and price consumers are willing to pay. Although the product orientation has largely been supplanted by the marketing orientation, firms practicing a product orientation can still be found in haute couture and arts marketing.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Sales</span></span>\r\nA sales orientation focuses on the selling/promotion of the firm's existing products, rather than developing new products to satisfy unmet needs or wants. This orientation seeks to attain the highest possible sales through promotion and direct sales techniques. The sales orientation &quot;is typically practiced with unsought goods.&quot; One study found that industrial companies are more likely to hold a sales orientation than consumer goods companies. The approach may also suit scenarios in which a firm holds dead stock, or otherwise sells a product that is in high demand, with little likelihood of changes in consumer tastes diminishing demand.\r\nA 2011 meta-analyses found that the factors with the greatest impact on sales performance are a salesperson's sales-related knowledge (knowledge of market segments, sales presentation skills, conflict resolution, and products), degree of adaptiveness (changing behavior based on the aforementioned knowledge), role clarity (salesperson's role is to expressly to sell), cognitive aptitude (intelligence) and work engagement (motivation and interest in a sales role).\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Production</span></span>\r\nA firm focusing on a production orientation specializes in producing as much as possible of a given product or service in order to achieve economies of scale or economies of scope. A production orientation may be deployed when a high demand for a product or service exists, coupled with certainty that consumer tastes and preferences remain relatively constant (similar to the sales orientation). The so-called production era is thought to have dominated marketing practice from the 1860s to the 1930s, but other theorists argue that evidence of the production orientation can still be found in some companies or industries. Specifically, Kotler and Armstrong note that the production philosophy is &quot;one of the oldest philosophies that guides sellers... [and] is still useful in some situations.&quot;\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Marketing</span></span>\r\nThe marketing orientation is the most common orientation used in contemporary marketing. It is a customer-centric approach that involves a firm basing its marketing program around products that suit new consumer tastes. Firms adopting a marketing orientation typically engage in extensive market research to gauge consumer desires, use R&amp;D (Research &amp; Development) to develop a product attuned to the revealed information, and then utilize promotion techniques to ensure consumers are aware of the product's existence and the benefits it can deliver. Scales designed to measure a firm's overall market orientation have been developed and found to be robust in a variety of contexts.\r\nThe marketing orientation has three prime facets, which are:\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \">Customer orientation:</span> A firm in the market economy can survive by producing goods that people are willing and able to buy. Consequently, ascertaining consumer demand is vital for a firm's future viability and even existence as a going concern.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic; \">Organizational orientation:</span> The marketing department is of prime importance within the functional level of an organization. Information from the marketing department is used to guide the actions of a company's other departments.\r\nAs an example, a marketing department could ascertain (via marketing research) that consumers desired a new type of product or a new usage for an existing product. With this in mind, the marketing department would inform the R&amp;D department to create a prototype of a product/service based on consumers' new desires.\r\nThe production department would then start to manufacture the product, while the marketing department would focus on the promotion, distribution, pricing, etc. of the product. Additionally, a firm's finance department would be consulted, with respect to securing appropriate funding for the development, production, and promotion of the product. Finance may oppose the required capital expenditure since it could undermine a healthy cash flow for the organization.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic;\">Mutually beneficial exchange:</span> In a transaction in the market economy, a firm gains revenue, which thus leads to more profits, market shares, and/or sales. A consumer, on the other hand, gains the satisfaction of a need/want, utility, reliability and value for money from the purchase of a product or service.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic;\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Societal marketing</span></span>\r\nA number of scholars and practitioners have argued that marketers have a greater social responsibility than simply satisfying customers and providing them with superior value. Marketing organizations that have embraced the societal marketing concept typically identify key stakeholder groups such as employees, customers, and local communities. Companies that adopt a societal marketing perspective typically practice triple bottom line reporting whereby they publish social impact and environmental impact reports alongside financial performance reports. Sustainable marketing or green marketing is an extension of societal marketing.","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/icon_Marketing.png"},{"id":341,"title":"Customer Service","alias":"customer-service","description":" Customer service is the process of ensuring customer satisfaction with a product or service. Often, customer service takes place while performing a transaction for the customer, such as making a sale or returning an item. Customer service can take the form of in-person interaction, a phone call, self-service systems, or by other means.\r\nCustomer service is an important part of maintaining ongoing client relationships, which is key to continuing revenue. For this reason, many companies have worked hard to increase their customer satisfaction levels.\r\nMost successful businesses recognize the importance of providing outstanding customer service. Courteous and empathetic interaction with a trained customer service representative can mean the difference between losing or retaining a customer.\r\nWhen problems arise, customers should receive timely attention to the issue. Prompt attention to emails and phone calls is critical to maintaining good relations. Requiring customers to stand in long lines or sit on hold can sour an interaction before it begins.\r\nIdeally, customer service should be a one-stop endeavor for the consumer. For example, if a customer calls a helpline regarding a problem with a product, the customer service representative should follow through with the customer until the issue is fully resolved.\r\nThis may entail scheduling appointments with in-person repair personnel if the problem cannot be resolved on the phone, or transferring a call to skilled technicians in another department. Proactively following up with the customer to ensure that he or she is fully satisfied is another smart move.","materialsDescription":" What are customer service standards?\r\nCustomer service standards are an internal corporate set of rules governing the company's customer service activities, an algorithm for communicating with customers, and general standards for responding to unusual situations. The standard of customer service is an integral part of the corporate standard of the company.\r\nFunctions of customer service standards:\r\n<ol><li>To order. The client does not encounter problems, does not see them, which means that he is confident that all the staff without exception are professionals who know their business.</li><li>To control. It is difficult to assess and monitor the work of each manager if there are no clear criteria for evaluation. At the same time, the implementation of the sales plan cannot be the only parameter of the assessment; you need to know whether the manager of customer service standards adopted in this company adheres.</li><li>To adapt. Among other things, the availability of customer service standards simplifies the procedure.</li></ol>\r\nCustomer service standards are effective if the customer does not see the difference between the work of two (or more) managers, and sees only “proprietary” service, always the same, regardless of any external factors or circumstances. The customer service standard, which has been tested in practice, backed up by experience (perhaps even someone else's), created on the basis of analytical studies and recognized methods, can be called &quot;gold&quot;. It allows you to increase profits, improve the image of the company, attract new customers.\r\nCustomer service standards are an important part of the company's brand. But, in addition, the standards are necessary and other units, in particular, the department to work with staff. Therefore, their development must take into account the needs of all interested services of the company.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">What is the purpose of introducing customer service standards in the company?</span>\r\nThe objectives of implementing the standards are as follows:\r\n<ul><li>For employees with experience: minimize the number of erroneous and unnecessary actions. The result of this will be saving time of each employee (no errors - no need to spend time correcting them). And, as a result, increased productivity.</li><li>For novice employees: customer service standards allow you to transfer the necessary knowledge in the most concise manner and in a short time.</li><li>For the company: the abolition of dependence on the old-timers. Not all employees who have worked in the company for many years (or even since the day of foundation) are able to resist the so-called star disease. Having knowledge and experience, a person loses the ability to objectively evaluate his work, he begins to think that he is the best manager in the company. It can end very badly - in the event of dismissal, such an employee will take the base, and turn clients against the company. Standards for customer service are needed to ensure that all employees can be assessed on a single scale, based on the actual benefits they bring to the company, as well as the attitude of the employee to the company.</li><li>For the company: the uniformity of control activities of managers. Standards are unequivocal, exclude double interpretations, and therefore cannot cause controversy about the rightness of an employee or employer.</li><li>For managers: the standards of uniform customer service are the same for all managers, and this makes it possible to make the pay of each manager absolutely transparent and intelligible. Realizing that there will be no double interpretations, the manager may not be afraid that he will be paid less than expected - all his mistakes and achievements are immediately visible and understandable.</li></ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">The application of service standards allows you:</span>\r\n<ul><li>to develop a company style in dealing with clients;</li><li>to increase the effectiveness of the work of managers with new customers;</li><li>to bring the quality of communication with customers to a higher level;</li><li>to create a positive opinion of the company about the company, so that it can be recommended to its acquaintances, thus increasing the number of potential and then real customers;</li><li>to minimize conflicts between the manager and the customer;</li><li>to develop a technology for training newcomers;</li><li>to transfer the assessment of the work of the manager from the subjective to the objective, transparent and understandable to everyone;</li><li>to establish a procedure for controlling the work of personnel;</li><li>to increase the motivation of managers to work.</li></ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Benefits of applying service standards</span>\r\n<ul><li>The accumulation of experience: the entire base focuses on the company, and not on the hands of managers, &quot;old-timers.&quot; Thus, the departure of one or several “old” employees does not become a “natural disaster” for the company.</li><li>Motivation, analysis and control: customer service standards make it possible to develop a transparent scheme of managers' motivation based on a clear, almost mathematical analysis of their work. The sales process is optimized.</li><li>Setting goals. With the help of standards, the company has the ability to set clear, reasonable plans. This allows you to keep the atmosphere in the team friendly and stable, and the lack of &quot;muffled&quot; tasks - to increase the loyalty of managers to the company.</li><li>Standards of customer service is a fairly mobile system that allows you to immediately detect errors in working with clients and quickly eliminate them. In addition, at any stage of working with a client, the head of the sales department can intervene in the process, noticing an error in the work of the manager, and even be proactive in order to prevent an error to which the manager is heading.</li><li>Quick and easy start for beginners. Customer service standards are actually a knowledge base, collected, analyzed, and streamlined. Such information is easily transmitted and assimilated by beginners, which means that the beginner quickly gets to work and starts to make a profit. In addition, a newbie will not spoil relations with a client by awkward actions, since he already knows what to do in any conflict and problem situations.</li><li>Customer confidence. Customer service standards allow the latter to feel confident in the company - no matter where the customer is, he will always easily recognize “his” company by brand features and can be absolutely sure that in a small town they will be served as qualitatively as in a million-plus city, because that the company is well aware of their work. So, such a company can be trusted.</li></ul>","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/icon_Customer_Service.png"}],"characteristics":[],"concurentProducts":[],"jobRoles":[],"organizationalFeatures":[],"complementaryCategories":[],"solutions":[],"materials":[],"useCases":[],"best_practices":[],"values":[],"implementations":[]},{"id":801,"logoURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/Absalon_CRM.jpg","logo":true,"scheme":false,"title":"Absalon CRM","vendorVerified":0,"rating":"1.40","implementationsCount":0,"suppliersCount":0,"supplierPartnersCount":1,"alias":"absalon-crm","companyTitle":"Absalon International","companyTypes":["supplier","vendor"],"companyId":3711,"companyAlias":"absalon-international","description":"\r\nAbsalon CRM Modules:\r\n<ol> <li>Marketing</li> <li>Sales</li> <li>Project Management</li> <li>Resource Planning</li> <li>Case Management</li> <li>Service Management</li> </ol>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; text-decoration-line: underline;\">MARKETING</span> The marketing module in Microsoft Dynamics CRM is, together with Absalon CRM, covering marketing lists, customer categorization, account plans, event management and more. <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Microsoft Dynamics CRM</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Support and registration of marketing activities for reporting, follow up and management</li> <li>Marketing lists: Create dynamic marketing lists, that update subsequently, as well as static marketing lists. Full Outlook integration with mailing possibilities straight from the marketing lists.</li> <li>Create process support for your marketing activities, both simple and complex ones</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Absalon add-on</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Categorization of customers based on needs of the organization and the area such as industry, sector or geography</li> <li>Event Management, gather all the information in one place. Contacts as event participants and their status at the event, check list for the event, document management through SharePoint</li> <li>Training Management with courses and participants, reuse data you previously created</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Microsoft add-on products for marketing</span>\r\n<ul> <li>With Microsoft Social Listening you have the possibility to capture activities on social media, arrange searches based on key words and visualize in nice dashboards with graphs and lists</li> <li>Dynamics Marketing gives you the possibility to take care of digital marketing, like newsletters and leads generation, with automation if you like</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">User experience</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Full integration with Outlook contacts and activities</li> <li>Good follow-up possibilities with graphs and views</li> <li>Consistently easy to use interface</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; text-decoration-line: underline;\">SALES</span> Absalon add-on extends the sales module developed from the already well-defined sales support that comes with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. With Absalon add-on the updating of data goes even faster, and administration time is reduced. <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Microsoft Dynamics CRM</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Business Process Flow with guiding steps in order to complete the sales process</li> <li>Track meetings and emails to your sales activities</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Absalon add-on</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Dynamic sales processes, helping you to follow the sales processes that apply to you</li> <li>Support for several simultaneous sales processes</li> <li>With Absalon add-on it’s easy to follow which customers you have contacted (and not contacted) for a certain period of time</li> <li>Customer Plans for targeted customer strategy on activity level with follow-up possibilities</li> <li>Opportunities to follow up recurring income over time</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">User experience</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Full integration with Outlook contacts and activities</li> <li>Good follow-up possibilities with graphs, views and dashboards</li> <li>Quick update of progressive sales processes</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; text-decoration-line: underline;\">PROJECT MANAGEMENT</span> The module for project management in Absalon CRM gather all information at the one place, where everybody has access to the same material and receives the latest updates. By gathering all the functionality in the same place, in the CRM, you utilize already existing information about customers, contacts, and activities. <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Microsoft Dynamics CRM</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Integration with Outlook activities, track emails and other activities in your projects</li> <li>Integration to SharePoint for document management</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Absalon add-on</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Start from one of your predefined project model</li> <li>Add project activities for each unique project</li> <li>With the ability to follow the people who are relevant to the project</li> <li>Spread the responsibility on project activities and project logs</li> <li>Time reporting on projects and/or project activities</li> <li>Do follow-up on the budget and hours towards activities and timesheets</li> <li>- Analyze and visualize through views, graphs and dashboards</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">User experience</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Access to the same information with the possibility of access control through security roles</li> <li>Connect to SharePoint for an integrated experience</li> <li>Visualize to illustrate the project's success or warning signs</li> <li>Simple time reporting</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; text-decoration-line: underline;\">RESOURCE PLANNING</span> With Absalon resource planning, resources can be booked for projects in different plans. Statistics and data for the plans are clear and you can follow the progress of work. By gathering all the functionality in the same place, in the CRM, you utilize already existing information about customers, contacts, and activities. <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Microsoft Dynamics CRM</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Integration with Outlook activities, track emails and other activities in your projects</li> <li>Integration to SharePoint for document management</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Absalon add-on</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Support for multiple simultaneous resource plans with the same or different resource members</li> <li>Save time by copying a resource allocation over time</li> <li>Duplicate resource allocations for faster input</li> <li>Use the built-in graphs to follow allocations as tools to plan for the future and utilize resources maximum</li> <li>Resource allocation to projects and project activities</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">User experience</span>\r\n<ul> <li>The user interface is familiar from other parts of the CRM, instant buttons and custom components make your work easier and graphs provide an instantaneous updated picture of the resource plan.</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; text-decoration-line: underline;\">CASE MANAGEMENT</span> Case management is a major part within CRM and Absalon add-on contains additional functionality which works well with existing Microsoft Dynamics CRM components. By gathering all the functionality in the same place, in the CRM, you utilize already existing information about customers, contacts, and activities. <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Microsoft Dynamics CRM</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Follow-up on contractual commitments for SLA</li> <li>Case registration with automatic update of entitlement terms, e.g. number of cases or hours, according to agreement</li> <li>Business Process Flow with guiding steps in order to complete the support process</li> <li>Cases automatically created based on in-coming email</li> <li>Support for case management through queues, and automatic routing of cases to queues</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Absalon add-on</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Dynamic defined process for case management and follow-up. Here you can have one or more processes at the same time, to adapt the work for each unique case.</li> <li>Possibilities to do time reports on projects and/or cases</li> <li>Case management within projects</li> <li>Possibility to continuously follow up aggregated statuses of open cases through graphs, views and dashboards</li> <li>Possibility to build a knowledge database based on recurring problems</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">User experience</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Simple and easy to use web interface</li> <li>Clear responsibilities for users in the process</li> <li>Full integration with Outlook contacts and activities</li> <li>Good follow-up possibilities with graphs and views, for cases as well as users</li> <li>Possibilities for follow-up that suits your organization</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; text-decoration-line: underline;\">SERVICE MANAGEMENT</span> Microsoft Dynamics CRM has built-in support for service, which Absalon add-on has expanded with support for service plans, installation, recurring and scheduled service cases. By gathering all the functionality in the same place, in the CRM, you utilize already existing information about customers, contacts, and activities. <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Microsoft Dynamics CRM</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Case management with SLA</li> <li>Microsoft Dynamics CRM has functionality for contract management that will help you get an overview of periods, rates and currencies etc</li> <li>Integration with Outlook activities</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Absalon add-on</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Installation management for the identification of existing installations such as machinery, equipment and products at your customers</li> <li>Add and follow the installation components</li> <li>Service Plans: add installations to a service plan and get control over when and where the services will be performed</li> <li>Work on the field, on- and offline, with Absalon Service app</li> <li>Follow up the maintenance work historically and onwards</li> <li>Register service cases within service plans, for installations and users</li> <li>Create service orders after completing the work, use it for billing purposes and sign in our mobile app solution</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Microsoft add-on products for Business Intelligence</span>\r\n<ul> <li>Use Microsoft Business Intelligence, e.g. Power Pivot, to clarify the status and plan the work in the best way</li> </ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">User experience</span>\r\n<ul> <li>With an easy to use interface and great opportunities for visualization on the user level, the work can be planned in the best way to exploit the resources right and follow-up service based on contract level.</li> <li>With Absalon Service app, users can work online or offline and quickly enter new data.</li> </ul>","shortDescription":"With Absalon CRM, you have full control over your customer relationships, from marketing and sales to service and delivery.","type":null,"isRoiCalculatorAvaliable":false,"isConfiguratorAvaliable":false,"bonus":100,"usingCount":0,"sellingCount":0,"discontinued":0,"rebateForPoc":0,"rebate":0,"seo":{"title":"Absalon CRM","keywords":"with, activities, Absalon, Microsoft, management, add-on, Dynamics, project","description":"\r\nAbsalon CRM Modules:\r\n<ol> <li>Marketing</li> <li>Sales</li> <li>Project Management</li> <li>Resource Planning</li> <li>Case Management</li> <li>Service Management</li> </ol>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; text-decoration-line: underline;\">MARKETING</span>","og:title":"Absalon CRM","og:description":"\r\nAbsalon CRM Modules:\r\n<ol> <li>Marketing</li> <li>Sales</li> <li>Project Management</li> <li>Resource Planning</li> <li>Case Management</li> <li>Service Management</li> </ol>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; text-decoration-line: underline;\">MARKETING</span>","og:image":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/Absalon_CRM.jpg"},"eventUrl":"","translationId":801,"dealDetails":null,"roi":null,"price":null,"bonusForReference":null,"templateData":[],"testingArea":"","categories":[{"id":71,"title":"CRM - Customer Relationship Management","alias":"crm-customer-relationship-management","description":"<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Customer service</span> is the provision of service to customers before, during and after a purchase. The perception of success of such interactions is dependent on employees &quot;who can adjust themselves to the personality of the guest&quot;. Customer service concerns the priority an organization assigns to customer service relative to components such as product innovation and pricing. In this sense, an organization that values good customer service may spend more money in training employees than the average organization or may proactively interview customers for feedback.\r\nA <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">customer support</span> is a range of customer services to assist customers in making cost effective and correct use of a product. It includes assistance in planning, installation, training, trouble shooting, maintenance, upgrading, and disposal of a product. These services even may be done at customer's side where he/she uses the product or service. In this case it is called &quot;at home customer services&quot; or &quot;at home customer support.&quot;\r\nRegarding technology, products such as mobile phones, televisions, computers, software products or other electronic or mechanical goods, it is termed technical support. \r\nCustomer service may be provided by a person (e.g., sales and service representative), or by automated means, such as kiosks, Internet sites, and apps.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">CRM </span>(Customer Relationship Management) is an approach to manage a company's interaction with current and potential customers. It uses data analysis about customers' history with a company to improve business relationships with customers, specifically focusing on customer retention and ultimately driving sales growth.\r\nOne important aspect of the CRM approach is the systems of CRM that compile data from a range of different communication channels, including a company's website, telephone, email, live chat, marketing materials and more recently, social media. Through the CRM approach and the systems used to facilitate it, businesses learn more about their target audiences and how to best cater to their needs.\r\nCRM helps users focus on their organization’s relationships with individual people including customers, service users, colleagues, or suppliers.\r\nWhen people talk about customer relationship management system, they might mean any of three things: \r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">CRM as Technology</span>: This is a technology product, often in the cloud, that teams use to record, report and analyse interactions between the company and users. This is also called a CRM system or solution.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">CRM as a Strategy</span>: This is a business’ philosophy about how relationships with customers and potential customers should be managed.&nbsp; </li><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">CRM as a Process</span>: Think of this as a system a business adopts to nurture and manage those relationships.</li></ul>\r\n<br /><br /><br />","materialsDescription":"<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal;\">Why is CRM important?</span></h1>\r\nCRM management system enables a business to deepen its relationships with customers, service users, colleagues, partners and suppliers.\r\nForging good relationships and keeping track of prospects and customers is crucial for customer acquisition and retention, which is at the heart of a CRM’s function. You can see everything in one place — a simple, customizable dashboard that can tell you a customer’s previous history with you, the status of their orders, any outstanding customer service issues, and more.\r\nGartner predicts that by 2021, CRM technology will be the single largest revenue area of spending in enterprise software. If your business is going to last, you know that you need a strategy for the future. For forward-thinking businesses, CRM is the framework for that strategy.\r\n<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal;\">What are the benefits of CRM?</span></h1>\r\nBy collecting and organising data about customer interactions, making it accessible and actionable for all, and facilitating analysis of that data, CRM offers many benefits and advantages.<br />The benefits and advantages of CRM include:\r\n<ul><li>Enhanced contact management</li><li>Cross-team collaboration</li><li>Heightened productivity</li><li>Empowered sales management</li><li>Accurate sales forecasting</li><li>Reliable reporting</li><li>Improved sales metrics</li><li>Increased customer satisfaction and retention</li><li>Boosted marketing ROI</li><li>Enriched products and services</li></ul>\r\n<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal;\">What are the key features of most popular CRM software programs?</span></h1>\r\nWhile many CRM solutions differ in their specific value propositions — depending on your business size, priority function, or industry type — they usually share some core features. These, in fact, are the foundation of any top CRM software, without which you might end up using an inferior app or an over-rated address book. So, let’s discuss the key features you need to look for when figuring out the best CRM software for your business.\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Contact management</span>. The best CRM solutions aren’t just an address book that only organizes contact details. It manages customer data in a centralized place and gives you a 360-degree view of your customers. You should be able to organize customers’ personal information, demographics, interactions, and transactions in ways that are meaningful to your goals or processes. Moreover, a good contact management feature lets you personalize your outreach campaign. By collecting personal, social, and purchase data, it will help you to segment target audience groups in different ways.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Reporting and dashboards</span>. These features of customer relationship management allow you to use analytics to interpret customer data. Reporting is very useful if you want to consolidate disparate data and churn out insights in different visualizations. This lets you make better decisions or proactively deal with market trends and customer behavioral patterns. The more visual widgets a CRM software has, the better you can present reports. Furthermore, a best customer relationship management software will generate real-time data, making reporting more accurate and timely. Reporting also keeps you tab on sales opportunities like upsell, resell, and cross-sell, especially when integrated with e-commerce platforms.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Lead management</span>. These features let you manage leads all the way to win-loss stage. They pave a clear path to conversion, so you can quickly assess how the business is performing. One of the main three legs that comprises the best client relationship management software (the other two being contact management and reporting), lead management unburdens the sales team from follow-ups, tracking, and repetitive tasks.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Deals and tasks</span>. Deals and tasks are closely associated with leads. Deals are leads at the negotiation stage, so it’s critical to keep a close eye on their associated tasks for a higher chance of conversion.<br />CRM software tools should also let you track both deals and tasks in their respective windows or across the sales stages. Whether you’re viewing a contact or analyzing the sales pipeline, you should be able to immediately check the deal’s tasks and details. Deals and tasks should also have user permissions to protect leaks of sensitive data. Similarly, alerts are critical to tasks so deadlines are met. Notifications are usually sent via email or prominently displayed on the user’s dashboard.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Campaign management</span>. Solid CRM software will integrate this feature to enable marketing processes from outreach concept to A/B testing to deployment and to post analysis. This will allow you to sort campaigns to target segments in your contacts and define deployment strategies. You will also be able to define metrics for various channels, then plow back the insights generated by post-campaign analytics into planning more campaigns.<br />Recurring outreach efforts can also be automated. For instance, you can set to instantly appropriate content to contacts based on their interest or send tiered autoresponders based on campaign feedback.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Email management</span>. By integrating with popular email clients like Gmail and Outlook, CRM solutions can capture email messages and sort important details that can be saved in contacts or synced with leads. They can also track activities like opened emails, forwarded emails, clicked links, and downloaded files. Emails can also be qualified for prospecting.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Social media management. </span>Popular CRM systems feature an integrated social media management where you can view different social media pages from the CRM’s interface. This is a convenient way to post, reply on, and manage all your pages. Likewise, this feature gives you a better perspective on how customers are interacting with your brand. A glean of their likes and dislikes, interests, shares, and public conversations helps you to assess customer biases and preferences. Customers are also increasingly using social media to contact companies; hence, a good CRM should alert you for brand mentions.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Mobile access</span>. With more users accessing apps via mobile devices, many vendors have been prioritizing mobile-first platforms. Emergence Capital Partners study found over 300 mobile-first apps so far and CRM is definitely one their targets. Many CRM solutions have both Android and iOS apps. Mobile access works in two ways to be highly appreciated: accessing data and inputting data while on location. Field sales with the latest sales information on hand may be able to interest prospects better. Conversely, sales reps can quickly update deals across the pipeline even as they come off a client meeting.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/CRM_-_Customer_Relationship_Management.png"}],"characteristics":[],"concurentProducts":[],"jobRoles":[],"organizationalFeatures":[],"complementaryCategories":[],"solutions":[],"materials":[],"useCases":[],"best_practices":[],"values":[],"implementations":[]},{"id":4097,"logoURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/microsoft.png","logo":true,"scheme":false,"title":"Microsoft Bot Framework","vendorVerified":0,"rating":"2.00","implementationsCount":0,"suppliersCount":0,"supplierPartnersCount":272,"alias":"microsoft-bot-framework","companyTitle":"Microsoft","companyTypes":["vendor"],"companyId":163,"companyAlias":"microsoft","description":"Azure Bot Service enables you to build intelligent, enterprise-grade bots with ownership and control of your data. Begin with a simple Q&amp;A bot or build a sophisticated virtual assistant.\r\nUse comprehensive open-source SDK and tools to easily connect your bot to popular channels and devices. Give your bot the ability to speak, listen, and understand your users with native integration to Azure Cognitive Services.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">AI and natural language</span>\r\nCreate a bot with the ability to speak, listen, understand, and learn from your users with Azure Cognitive Services.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Open &amp; Extensible</span>\r\nBenefit from open-source SDK and tools to build, test, and connect bots that interact naturally with users, wherever they are.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Enterprise-grade solutions</span>\r\nBuild secure, global, scalable solutions that integrate with your existing IT ecosystem.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Ownership and control</span>\r\nCreate an AI experience that can extend your brand and keep you in control of your own data.","shortDescription":"Microsoft Bot Framework is a comprehensive framework for building enterprise-grade conversational AI experiences.","type":null,"isRoiCalculatorAvaliable":false,"isConfiguratorAvaliable":false,"bonus":100,"usingCount":16,"sellingCount":17,"discontinued":0,"rebateForPoc":0,"rebate":0,"seo":{"title":"Microsoft Bot Framework","keywords":"","description":"Azure Bot Service enables you to build intelligent, enterprise-grade bots with ownership and control of your data. 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Such programs are often designed to convincingly simulate how a human would behave as a conversational partner, although as of 2019, they are far short of being able to pass the Turing test. Chatbots are typically used in dialog systems for various practical purposes including customer service or information acquisition. Some chatbots use sophisticated natural language processing systems, but many simpler ones scan for keywords within the input, then pull a reply with the most matching keywords, or the most similar wording pattern, from a database.\r\nThe term &quot;ChatterBot&quot; was originally coined by Michael Mauldin (creator of the first Verbot, Julia) in 1994 to describe these conversational programs. Today, most chatbots are accessed via virtual assistants such as Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, via messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger or WeChat, or via individual organizations' apps and websites. Chatbots can be classified into usage categories such as conversational commerce (e-commerce via chat), analytics, communication, customer support, design, developer tools, education, entertainment, finance, food, games, health, HR, marketing, news, personal, productivity, shopping, social, sports, travel and utilities.\r\nBeyond chatbots, Conversational AI refers to the use of messaging apps, speech-based assistants and chatbots to automate communication and create personalized customer experiences at scale.\r\nThe process of building, testing and deploying chatbots can be done on cloud-based chatbot development platforms offered by cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers such as Oracle Cloud Platform SnatchBot and IBM Watson. These cloud platforms provide Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence and Mobile Backend as a Service for chatbot development.\r\nSome Companies like Microsoft Azure and AARC are currently providing their Bot Engines through which chatbot Platforms or Software can be developed.","materialsDescription":"New tools designed to simplify the interaction between humans and computers have hit the market: Chatbots or Virtual Assistants. In banking, chatbots and virtual assistants are some of the industry’s newest tools designed to simplify the interaction between humans and computers.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What is a chatbot?</span>\r\nA chatbot is artificial intelligence (AI) software that can simulate a conversation (or a chat) with a user in natural language through messaging applications, websites, mobile apps or through the telephone.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Why are chatbots important?</span>\r\nA chatbot is often described as one of the most advanced and promising expressions of interaction between humans and machines. However, from a technological point of view, a chatbot only represents the natural evolution of a Question-Answering system leveraging Natural Language Processing (NLP). Formulating responses to questions in natural language is one of the most typical examples of Natural Language Processing applied in various enterprises’ end-use applications.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">How does a chatbot work?</span>\r\nThere are two different tasks at the core of a chatbot:\r\n<ol><li>user request analysis</li><li>returning the response</li></ol>\r\nUser request analysis: this is the first task that a chatbot performs. It analyzes the user’s request to identify the user intent and to extract relevant entities.\r\nThe ability to identify the user’s intent and extract data and relevant entities contained in the user’s request is the first condition and the most relevant step at the core of a chatbot: If you are not able to correctly understand the user’s request, you won’t be able to provide the correct answer.\r\nReturning the response: once the user’s intent has been identified, the chatbot must provide the most appropriate response for the user’s request. The answer may be:\r\n<ul><li>a generic and predefined text;</li><li>a text retrieved from a knowledge base that contains different answers;</li><li>a contextualized piece of information based on data the user has provided;</li><li>data stored in enterprise systems;</li><li>the result of an action that the chatbot performed by interacting with one or more backend application;</li><li>a disambiguating question that helps the chatbot to correctly understand the user’s request.</li></ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">In what is the benefit of chatbots?</span>\r\nChatbot applications streamline interactions between people and services, enhancing the customer experience. At the same time, they offer companies new opportunities to improve the customer's engagement process and operational efficiency by reducing the typical cost of customer service.\r\nTo be successful, a chatbot solution should be able to effectively perform both of these tasks. Human support plays a key role here: Regardless of the kind of approach and the platform, human intervention is crucial in configuring, training and optimizing the chatbot system.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Which chatbot application is right for you?</span>\r\nThere are different approaches and tools that you can use to develop a chatbot. Depending on the use case you want to address, some chatbot technologies are more appropriate than others. In order to achieve the desired results, the combination of different AI forms such as natural language processing, machine learning, and semantic understanding may be the best option.","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/icon_Chatbot_Development.png"}],"characteristics":[],"concurentProducts":[],"jobRoles":[],"organizationalFeatures":[],"complementaryCategories":[],"solutions":[],"materials":[],"useCases":[],"best_practices":[],"values":[],"implementations":[]},{"id":4105,"logoURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/microsoft.png","logo":true,"scheme":false,"title":"Luis.ai","vendorVerified":0,"rating":"2.00","implementationsCount":0,"suppliersCount":0,"supplierPartnersCount":272,"alias":"luisai","companyTitle":"Microsoft","companyTypes":["vendor"],"companyId":163,"companyAlias":"microsoft","description":"<p>Language Understanding (LUIS) is a machine learning-based service to build natural language into apps, bots, and IoT devices. Quickly create enterprise-ready, custom models that continuously improve.</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Benefits:</span></span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Add natural language to your apps</span></p>\r\n<p>Designed to identify valuable information in conversations, LUIS interprets user goals (intents) and distills valuable information from sentences (entities), for a high quality, nuanced language model. LUIS integrates seamlessly with the Azure Bot Service, making it easy to create a sophisticated bot.</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Quickly build a custom language solution</span></p>\r\n<p>Powerful developer tools are combined with customizable pre-built apps and entity dictionaries, such as Calendar, Music, and Devices, so you can build and deploy a solution more quickly. Dictionaries are mined from the collective knowledge of the web and supply billions of entries, helping your model to correctly identify valuable information from user conversations.</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Always learning and improving</span></p>\r\n<p>Active learning is used to continuously improve the quality of natural language models. Once the model starts processing input, LUIS begins active learning, allowing you to constantly update and improve the model.</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Enterprise-ready, available worldwide</span></p>\r\n<p>The service is ready to be deployed in commercial applications and can scale with enterprise quality and performance. The service meets international compliance standards, supports 13 languages and available worldwide, making it highly accessible around the world.</p>","shortDescription":"A machine learning-based service to build natural language into apps, bots, and IoT devices. Quickly create enterprise-ready, custom models that continuously improve.","type":null,"isRoiCalculatorAvaliable":false,"isConfiguratorAvaliable":false,"bonus":100,"usingCount":7,"sellingCount":12,"discontinued":0,"rebateForPoc":0,"rebate":0,"seo":{"title":"Luis.ai","keywords":"","description":"<p>Language Understanding (LUIS) is a machine learning-based service to build natural language into apps, bots, and IoT devices. Quickly create enterprise-ready, custom models that continuously improve.</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><span s","og:title":"Luis.ai","og:description":"<p>Language Understanding (LUIS) is a machine learning-based service to build natural language into apps, bots, and IoT devices. Quickly create enterprise-ready, custom models that continuously improve.</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><span s","og:image":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/microsoft.png"},"eventUrl":"","translationId":4106,"dealDetails":null,"roi":null,"price":null,"bonusForReference":null,"templateData":[{"id":103,"title":"Chatbot Development"}],"testingArea":"","categories":[{"id":842,"title":"Chatbot Development","alias":"chatbot-development","description":"A chatbot is a piece of software that conducts a conversation via auditory or textual methods. Such programs are often designed to convincingly simulate how a human would behave as a conversational partner, although as of 2019, they are far short of being able to pass the Turing test. Chatbots are typically used in dialog systems for various practical purposes including customer service or information acquisition. Some chatbots use sophisticated natural language processing systems, but many simpler ones scan for keywords within the input, then pull a reply with the most matching keywords, or the most similar wording pattern, from a database.\r\nThe term &quot;ChatterBot&quot; was originally coined by Michael Mauldin (creator of the first Verbot, Julia) in 1994 to describe these conversational programs. Today, most chatbots are accessed via virtual assistants such as Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, via messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger or WeChat, or via individual organizations' apps and websites. Chatbots can be classified into usage categories such as conversational commerce (e-commerce via chat), analytics, communication, customer support, design, developer tools, education, entertainment, finance, food, games, health, HR, marketing, news, personal, productivity, shopping, social, sports, travel and utilities.\r\nBeyond chatbots, Conversational AI refers to the use of messaging apps, speech-based assistants and chatbots to automate communication and create personalized customer experiences at scale.\r\nThe process of building, testing and deploying chatbots can be done on cloud-based chatbot development platforms offered by cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers such as Oracle Cloud Platform SnatchBot and IBM Watson. These cloud platforms provide Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence and Mobile Backend as a Service for chatbot development.\r\nSome Companies like Microsoft Azure and AARC are currently providing their Bot Engines through which chatbot Platforms or Software can be developed.","materialsDescription":"New tools designed to simplify the interaction between humans and computers have hit the market: Chatbots or Virtual Assistants. In banking, chatbots and virtual assistants are some of the industry’s newest tools designed to simplify the interaction between humans and computers.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What is a chatbot?</span>\r\nA chatbot is artificial intelligence (AI) software that can simulate a conversation (or a chat) with a user in natural language through messaging applications, websites, mobile apps or through the telephone.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Why are chatbots important?</span>\r\nA chatbot is often described as one of the most advanced and promising expressions of interaction between humans and machines. However, from a technological point of view, a chatbot only represents the natural evolution of a Question-Answering system leveraging Natural Language Processing (NLP). Formulating responses to questions in natural language is one of the most typical examples of Natural Language Processing applied in various enterprises’ end-use applications.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">How does a chatbot work?</span>\r\nThere are two different tasks at the core of a chatbot:\r\n<ol><li>user request analysis</li><li>returning the response</li></ol>\r\nUser request analysis: this is the first task that a chatbot performs. It analyzes the user’s request to identify the user intent and to extract relevant entities.\r\nThe ability to identify the user’s intent and extract data and relevant entities contained in the user’s request is the first condition and the most relevant step at the core of a chatbot: If you are not able to correctly understand the user’s request, you won’t be able to provide the correct answer.\r\nReturning the response: once the user’s intent has been identified, the chatbot must provide the most appropriate response for the user’s request. The answer may be:\r\n<ul><li>a generic and predefined text;</li><li>a text retrieved from a knowledge base that contains different answers;</li><li>a contextualized piece of information based on data the user has provided;</li><li>data stored in enterprise systems;</li><li>the result of an action that the chatbot performed by interacting with one or more backend application;</li><li>a disambiguating question that helps the chatbot to correctly understand the user’s request.</li></ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">In what is the benefit of chatbots?</span>\r\nChatbot applications streamline interactions between people and services, enhancing the customer experience. At the same time, they offer companies new opportunities to improve the customer's engagement process and operational efficiency by reducing the typical cost of customer service.\r\nTo be successful, a chatbot solution should be able to effectively perform both of these tasks. Human support plays a key role here: Regardless of the kind of approach and the platform, human intervention is crucial in configuring, training and optimizing the chatbot system.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Which chatbot application is right for you?</span>\r\nThere are different approaches and tools that you can use to develop a chatbot. Depending on the use case you want to address, some chatbot technologies are more appropriate than others. In order to achieve the desired results, the combination of different AI forms such as natural language processing, machine learning, and semantic understanding may be the best option.","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/icon_Chatbot_Development.png"}],"characteristics":[],"concurentProducts":[],"jobRoles":[],"organizationalFeatures":[],"complementaryCategories":[],"solutions":[],"materials":[],"useCases":[],"best_practices":[],"values":[],"implementations":[]},{"id":778,"logoURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/Microsoft_Surface_Laptop.jpg","logo":true,"scheme":false,"title":"Microsoft Surface Laptop","vendorVerified":0,"rating":"2.00","implementationsCount":0,"suppliersCount":0,"supplierPartnersCount":272,"alias":"microsoft-surface-laptop","companyTitle":"Microsoft","companyTypes":["vendor"],"companyId":163,"companyAlias":"microsoft","description":"Surface Laptop provides the perfect blend of texture, subtle details, and clean, elegant lines — plus the luxurious touch of our Signature Alcantara® material-covered keyboard.\r\nThe perfect balance of portability and performance.\r\nYou don’t have to choose between power and traveling light. At just 2.76 pounds, Surface Laptop gives you an ideal balance of both, plus all-day battery life.\r\nA stunning screen that responds to your touch.\r\nExperience faster, more natural navigation on the vibrant 13.5” PixelSense™ Display with immersive touchscreen. Enjoy more space for your ideas with an edge-to-edge display and ultra-thin bezel.\r\n\r\n","shortDescription":"Microsoft Surface Laptop is designed for Windows 10 S — streamlined for security and superior performance.2 Applications are delivered via the Windows Store, ensuring that they’re Microsoft verified.","type":null,"isRoiCalculatorAvaliable":false,"isConfiguratorAvaliable":false,"bonus":100,"usingCount":13,"sellingCount":10,"discontinued":0,"rebateForPoc":0,"rebate":0,"seo":{"title":"Microsoft Surface Laptop","keywords":"Laptop, Surface, touch, your, plus, perfect, balance, with","description":"Surface Laptop provides the perfect blend of texture, subtle details, and clean, elegant lines — plus the luxurious touch of our Signature Alcantara® material-covered keyboard.\r\nThe perfect balance of portability and performance.\r\nYou don’t have to choose betw","og:title":"Microsoft Surface Laptop","og:description":"Surface Laptop provides the perfect blend of texture, subtle details, and clean, elegant lines — plus the luxurious touch of our Signature Alcantara® material-covered keyboard.\r\nThe perfect balance of portability and performance.\r\nYou don’t have to choose betw","og:image":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/Microsoft_Surface_Laptop.jpg"},"eventUrl":"","translationId":779,"dealDetails":null,"roi":null,"price":null,"bonusForReference":null,"templateData":[],"testingArea":"","categories":[],"characteristics":[],"concurentProducts":[],"jobRoles":[],"organizationalFeatures":[],"complementaryCategories":[],"solutions":[],"materials":[],"useCases":[],"best_practices":[],"values":[],"implementations":[]},{"id":1034,"logoURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/Microsoft_Coco_Framework.png","logo":true,"scheme":false,"title":"Microsoft Coco Framework","vendorVerified":0,"rating":"2.00","implementationsCount":0,"suppliersCount":0,"supplierPartnersCount":272,"alias":"microsoft-coco-framework","companyTitle":"Microsoft","companyTypes":["vendor"],"companyId":163,"companyAlias":"microsoft","description":"Coco achieves this by designing specifically for confidential consortiums, where nodes and actors are explicitly declared and controlled. Based on these requirements, Coco presents an alternative approach to ledger construction, giving enterprises the scalability, distributed governance and enhanced confidentiality they need without sacrificing the inherent security and immutability they expect.\r\nLeveraging the power of existing blockchain protocols, trusted execution environments (TEEs) such as Intel SGX and Windows Virtual Secure Mode (VSM), distributed systems and cryptography, Coco enables enterprise-ready blockchain networks that deliver:\r\n\r\n<ul><li>Throughput and latency approaching database speeds.</li><li>Richer, more flexible, business-specific confidentiality models.</li><li>Network policy management through distributed governance.</li><li>Support for non-deterministic transactions.</li></ul>\r\nBy providing these capabilities, Coco offers a trusted foundation with which existing blockchain protocols can be integrated to deliver complete, enterprise-ready ledger solutions, opening up broad, high scale scenarios across industries, and furthering blockchain's ability to digital transform business.\r\nWe have already begun exploring Coco’s potential across a variety of industries, including retail, supply chain and financial services.\r\nWhether a customer is designing an end-to-end trade finance solution, using blockchain to ensure security at the edge or leveraging Enterprise Smart Contracts to drive back office efficiencies, Coco enables them to meet their enterprise requirements. Microsoft is the only cloud provider that delivers consistency across on-premises and the public cloud at hyperscale while providing access to the rich Azure ecosystem for the wide range of applications that will be built on top of blockchain as a shared data layer.\r\nAn open approach\r\nBy design, Coco is open and compatible with any blockchain protocol. Microsoft has already begun integrating Ethereum into Coco and we’re thrilled to announce that J.P. Morgan Chase, Intel and R3 have committed to integrating enterprise ledgers, Quorum, Hyperledger Sawtooth and Corda, respectively. This is just the beginning, and we look forward to exploring integration opportunities with other ledgers in the near future.\r\n","shortDescription":"Microsoft Coco Framework is an open-source system that enables high-scale, confidential blockchain networks that meet all key enterprise requirements—providing a means to accelerate production enterprise adoption of blockchain technology.","type":null,"isRoiCalculatorAvaliable":false,"isConfiguratorAvaliable":false,"bonus":100,"usingCount":14,"sellingCount":10,"discontinued":0,"rebateForPoc":0,"rebate":0,"seo":{"title":"Microsoft Coco Framework","keywords":"Coco, blockchain, that, with, distributed, Microsoft, across, existing","description":"Coco achieves this by designing specifically for confidential consortiums, where nodes and actors are explicitly declared and controlled. 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Security software is a broad term that encompasses a suite of different types of software that deliver data and computer and network security in various forms. \r\nSecurity software can protect a computer from viruses, malware, unauthorized users and other security exploits originating from the Internet. Different types of security software include anti-virus software, firewall software, network security software, Internet security software, malware/spamware removal and protection software, cryptographic software, and more.\r\nIn end-user computing environments, anti-spam and anti-virus security software is the most common type of software used, whereas enterprise users add a firewall and intrusion detection system on top of it. \r\nSecurity soft may be focused on preventing attacks from reaching their target, on limiting the damage attacks can cause if they reach their target and on tracking the damage that has been caused so that it can be repaired. As the nature of malicious code evolves, security software also evolves.<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \"></span>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Firewall. </span>Firewall security software prevents unauthorized users from accessing a computer or network without restricting those who are authorized. Firewalls can be implemented with hardware or software. Some computer operating systems include software firewalls in the operating system itself. For example, Microsoft Windows has a built-in firewall. Routers and servers can include firewalls. There are also dedicated hardware firewalls that have no other function other than protecting a network from unauthorized access.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Antivirus.</span> Antivirus solutions work to prevent malicious code from attacking a computer by recognizing the attack before it begins. But it is also designed to stop an attack in progress that could not be prevented, and to repair damage done by the attack once the attack abates. Antivirus software is useful because it addresses security issues in cases where attacks have made it past a firewall. New computer viruses appear daily, so antivirus and security software must be continuously updated to remain effective.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Antispyware.</span> While antivirus software is designed to prevent malicious software from attacking, the goal of antispyware software is to prevent unauthorized software from stealing information that is on a computer or being processed through the computer. Since spyware does not need to attempt to damage data files or the operating system, it does not trigger antivirus software into action. However, antispyware software can recognize the particular actions spyware is taking by monitoring the communications between a computer and external message recipients. When communications occur that the user has not authorized, antispyware can notify the user and block further communications.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Home Computers.</span> Home computers and some small businesses usually implement&nbsp; security software at the desktop level - meaning on the PC itself. This category of computer security and protection, sometimes referred to as end-point security, remains resident, or continuously operating, on the desktop. Because the software is running, it uses system resources, and can slow the computer's performance. However, because it operates in real time, it can react rapidly to attacks and seek to shut them down when they occur.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Network Security.</span> When several computers are all on the same network, it's more cost-effective to implement security at the network level. Antivirus software can be installed on a server and then loaded automatically to each desktop. However firewalls are usually installed on a server or purchased as an independent device that is inserted into the network where the Internet connection comes in. All of the computers inside the network communicate unimpeded, but any data going in or out of the network over the Internet is filtered trough the firewall.<br /><br /><br />","materialsDescription":"<h1 class=\"align-center\"> <span style=\"font-weight: normal; \">What is IT security software?</span></h1>\r\nIT security software provides protection to businesses’ computer or network. It serves as a defense against unauthorized access and intrusion in such a system. It comes in various types, with many businesses and individuals already using some of them in one form or another.\r\nWith the emergence of more advanced technology, cybercriminals have also found more ways to get into the system of many organizations. Since more and more businesses are now relying their crucial operations on software products, the importance of security system software assurance must be taken seriously – now more than ever. Having reliable protection such as a security software programs is crucial to safeguard your computing environments and data. \r\n<p class=\"align-left\">It is not just the government or big corporations that become victims of cyber threats. In fact, small and medium-sized businesses have increasingly become targets of cybercrime over the past years. </p>\r\n<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal; \">What are the features of IT security software?</span></h1>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Automatic updates. </span>This ensures you don’t miss any update and your system is the most up-to-date version to respond to the constantly emerging new cyber threats.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Real-time scanning.</span> Dynamic scanning features make it easier to detect and infiltrate malicious entities promptly. Without this feature, you’ll risk not being able to prevent damage to your system before it happens.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Auto-clean.</span> A feature that rids itself of viruses even without the user manually removing it from its quarantine zone upon detection. Unless you want the option to review the malware, there is no reason to keep the malicious software on your computer which makes this feature essential.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Multiple app protection.</span> This feature ensures all your apps and services are protected, whether they’re in email, instant messenger, and internet browsers, among others.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Application level security.</span> This enables you to control access to the application on a per-user role or per-user basis to guarantee only the right individuals can enter the appropriate applications.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Role-based menu.</span> This displays menu options showing different users according to their roles for easier assigning of access and control.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Row-level (multi-tenant) security.</span> This gives you control over data access at a row-level for a single application. This means you can allow multiple users to access the same application but you can control the data they are authorized to view.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Single sign-on.</span> A session or user authentication process that allows users to access multiple related applications as long as they are authorized in a single session by only logging in their name and password in a single place.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">User privilege parameters.</span> These are customizable features and security as per individual user or role that can be accessed in their profile throughout every application.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Application activity auditing.</span> Vital for IT departments to quickly view when a user logged in and off and which application they accessed. Developers can log end-user activity using their sign-on/signoff activities.</li></ul>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\"><br /><br /><br /><br /></p>","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/icon_Security_Software.png"}],"characteristics":[],"concurentProducts":[],"jobRoles":[],"organizationalFeatures":[],"complementaryCategories":[],"solutions":[],"materials":[],"useCases":[],"best_practices":[],"values":[],"implementations":[]},{"id":1546,"logoURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/data-warehouse.jpg","logo":true,"scheme":false,"title":"Azure Data Warehouse","vendorVerified":0,"rating":"2.00","implementationsCount":0,"suppliersCount":0,"supplierPartnersCount":272,"alias":"azure-data-warehouse","companyTitle":"Microsoft","companyTypes":["vendor"],"companyId":163,"companyAlias":"microsoft","description":"<p>Create a single center for all your data, be it structured, unstructured or streaming data.&nbsp;Provide work of such transformational decisions, as functions of business analytics, reports, the expanded analytics and analytics in real time.&nbsp;To easily get started, take advantage of the performance, flexibility, and security of Azure's fully managed services, such as SQL Azure and Azure Databricks.</p>\r\n<h2>Get rid of worries</h2>\r\n<h2><br /><span style=\"font-weight: normal;\">Built-in advanced security features include transparent data encryption, auditing, threat detection, integration with Azure Active Directory and virtual network endpoints.&nbsp;Azure services correspond to&nbsp;more than 50 industry and geographic&nbsp;certifications and are available worldwide in&nbsp;42 regions&nbsp;to store your data wherever your users are located.&nbsp;Finally, Microsoft offers financially secured service level agreements to spare you any hassle.</span></h2>","shortDescription":"Azure Data Warehouse - is a modern data storage from Microsoft","type":null,"isRoiCalculatorAvaliable":false,"isConfiguratorAvaliable":false,"bonus":100,"usingCount":2,"sellingCount":19,"discontinued":0,"rebateForPoc":0,"rebate":0,"seo":{"title":"Azure Data Warehouse","keywords":"","description":"<p>Create a single center for all your data, be it structured, unstructured or streaming data.&nbsp;Provide work of such transformational decisions, as functions of business analytics, reports, the expanded analytics and analytics in real time.&nbsp;To easily ","og:title":"Azure Data Warehouse","og:description":"<p>Create a single center for all your data, be it structured, unstructured or streaming data.&nbsp;Provide work of such transformational decisions, as functions of business analytics, reports, the expanded analytics and analytics in real time.&nbsp;To easily ","og:image":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/data-warehouse.jpg"},"eventUrl":"","translationId":1549,"dealDetails":null,"roi":null,"price":null,"bonusForReference":null,"templateData":[{"id":24,"title":"IaaS - storage"}],"testingArea":"","categories":[{"id":789,"title":"IaaS - storage","alias":"iaas-storage","description":"IaaS is an abbreviation that stands for Infrastructure as a Service (“infrastructure as a service”). This model provides for a cloud provider to provide the client with the necessary amount of computing resources - virtual servers, remote workstations, data warehouses, with or without the provision of software - and software deployment within the infrastructure remains the client's prerogative. In essence, IaaS is an alternative to renting physical servers, racks in the data center, operating systems; instead, the necessary resources are purchased with the ability to quickly scale them if necessary. In many cases, this model may be more profitable than the traditional purchase and installation of equipment, here are just a few examples:\r\n<ul><li>if the need for computing resources is not constant and can vary greatly depending on the period, and there is no desire to overpay for unused capacity;</li><li>when a company is just starting its way on the market and does not have working capital in order to buy all the necessary infrastructure - a frequent option among startups;</li><li>there is a rapid growth in business, and the network infrastructure must keep pace with it;</li><li>if you need to reduce the cost of purchasing and maintaining equipment;</li><li>when a new direction is launched, and it is necessary to test it without investing significant funds in resources.</li></ul>\r\nIaaS can be organized on the basis of a public or private cloud, as well as by combining two approaches - the so-called. “Hybrid cloud”, created using the appropriate software.","materialsDescription":" IaaS or Infrastructure as a service translated into Russian as “Infrastructure as a service”.\r\n&quot;Infrastructure&quot; in the case of IaaS, it can be virtual servers and networks, data warehouses, operating systems.\r\n“As a service” means that the cloud infrastructure components listed above are provided to you as a connected service.\r\nIaaS is a cloud infrastructure utilization model in which the computing power is provided to the client for independent management.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What is the difference from PaaS and SaaS?</span>\r\nFrequently asked questions, what distinguishes IaaS, PaaS, SaaS from each other? What is the difference? Answering all questions, you decide to leave in the area of ​​responsibility of its IT specialists. It requires only time and financial costs for your business.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Who is responsible for what?</span>\r\nIn the case of using IaaS models, a company can independently use resources: install and run software, exercise control over systems, applications, and virtual storage systems.\r\nFor example, networks, servers, servers and servers. The IaaS service provider manages its own software and operating system, middleware and applications, is responsible for the infrastructure during the purchase, installation and configuration.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Why do companies choose IaaS?</span>\r\nScaling capabilities. All users have access to resources, and you must use all the resources you need.\r\nCost savings. As a rule, the use of cloud services costs the company less than buying its own infrastructure.\r\nMobility. Ability to work with conventional applications.","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/icon_IaaS_storage.png"}],"characteristics":[],"concurentProducts":[],"jobRoles":[],"organizationalFeatures":[],"complementaryCategories":[],"solutions":[],"materials":[],"useCases":[],"best_practices":[],"values":[],"implementations":[]},{"id":1550,"logoURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/Azure-Virtual-machines.png","logo":true,"scheme":false,"title":"Azure Virtual Machines","vendorVerified":0,"rating":"2.00","implementationsCount":0,"suppliersCount":0,"supplierPartnersCount":272,"alias":"azure-virtual-machines","companyTitle":"Microsoft","companyTypes":["vendor"],"companyId":163,"companyAlias":"microsoft","description":"<p>Supporting Linux, Windows Server, SQL Server, Oracle, IBM, SAP and other platforms, Azure virtual machines provide the flexibility of virtualization for a wide range of computing solutions.&nbsp;All current-generation virtual machines include load balancing and autoscaling.&nbsp; <span style=\"color: #505050; font-family: 'Segoe UI', SegoeUI, 'Segoe WP', Tahoma, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: #ffffff;\"><br /></span>Azure Virtual Machines - is a proposal that includes various solutions, from an inexpensive B series to virtual machines with the latest GPU optimized for machine learning.&nbsp;It is designed to perform any workloads within any budget.</p>","shortDescription":"Azure Virtual Machines - is a computing service from Microsoft","type":null,"isRoiCalculatorAvaliable":false,"isConfiguratorAvaliable":false,"bonus":100,"usingCount":12,"sellingCount":5,"discontinued":0,"rebateForPoc":0,"rebate":0,"seo":{"title":"Azure Virtual Machines","keywords":"","description":"<p>Supporting Linux, Windows Server, SQL Server, Oracle, IBM, SAP and other platforms, Azure virtual machines provide the flexibility of virtualization for a wide range of computing solutions.&nbsp;All current-generation virtual machines include load balancing","og:title":"Azure Virtual Machines","og:description":"<p>Supporting Linux, Windows Server, SQL Server, Oracle, IBM, SAP and other platforms, Azure virtual machines provide the flexibility of virtualization for a wide range of computing solutions.&nbsp;All current-generation virtual machines include load balancing","og:image":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/Azure-Virtual-machines.png"},"eventUrl":"","translationId":1551,"dealDetails":null,"roi":null,"price":null,"bonusForReference":null,"templateData":[{"id":26,"title":"IaaS - computing"}],"testingArea":"","categories":[{"id":786,"title":"IaaS - computing","alias":"iaas-computing","description":"Cloud computing is the on demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage and computing power, without direct active management by the user. The term is generally used to describe data centers available to many users over the Internet. Large clouds, predominant today, often have functions distributed over multiple locations from central servers. If the connection to the user is relatively close, it may be designated an edge server.\r\nInfrastructure as a service (IaaS) are online services that provide high-level APIs used to dereference various low-level details of underlying network infrastructure like physical computing resources, location, data partitioning, scaling, security, backup etc. A hypervisor, such as Xen, Oracle VirtualBox, Oracle VM, KVM, VMware ESX/ESXi, or Hyper-V, LXD, runs the virtual machines as guests. Pools of hypervisors within the cloud operational system can support large numbers of virtual machines and the ability to scale services up and down according to customers' varying requirements.\r\nTypically IaaS involve the use of a cloud orchestration technology like Open Stack, Apache Cloudstack or Open Nebula. This manages the creation of a virtual machine and decides on which hypervisor (i.e. physical host) to start it, enables VM migration features between hosts, allocates storage volumes and attaches them to VMs, usage information for billing and lots more.\r\nAn alternative to hypervisors are Linux containers, which run in isolated partitions of a single Linux kernel running directly on the physical hardware. Linux cgroups and namespaces are the underlying Linux kernel technologies used to isolate, secure and manage the containers. Containerisation offers higher performance than virtualization, because there is no hypervisor overhead. Also, container capacity auto-scales dynamically with computing load, which eliminates the problem of over-provisioning and enables usage-based billing.\r\nIaaS clouds often offer additional resources such as a virtual-machine disk-image library, raw block storage, file or object storage, firewalls, load balancers, IP addresses, virtual local area networks (VLANs), and software bundles.\r\nThe NIST's definition of cloud computing defines Infrastructure as a Service as:\r\n<ul><li>The capability provided to the consumer is to provision processing, storage, networks, and other fundamental computing resources where the consumer is able to deploy and run arbitrary software, which can include operating systems and applications.</li><li>The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure but has control over operating systems, storage, and deployed applications; and possibly limited control of select networking components (e.g., host firewalls).</li></ul>\r\nAccording to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the most basic cloud-service model is that of providers offering IT infrastructure — virtual machines and other resources — as a service to subscribers.\r\nIaaS-cloud providers supply these resources on-demand from their large pools of equipment installed in data centers. For wide-area connectivity, customers can use either the Internet or carrier clouds (dedicated virtual private networks). To deploy their applications, cloud users install operating-system images and their application software on the cloud infrastructure. In this model, the cloud user patches and maintains the operating systems and the application software. Cloud providers typically bill IaaS services on a utility computing basis: cost reflects the amount of resources allocated and consumed.","materialsDescription":" <span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Cloud Computing Basics</span>\r\nWhether you are running applications that share photos to millions of mobile users or you’re supporting the critical operations of your business, a cloud services platform provides rapid access to flexible and low cost IT resources. With cloud computing, you don’t need to make large upfront investments in hardware and spend a lot of time on the heavy lifting of managing that hardware. Instead, you can provision exactly the right type and size of computing resources you need to power your newest bright idea or operate your IT department. You can access as many resources as you need, almost instantly, and only pay for what you use.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">How Does Cloud Computing Work?</span>\r\nCloud computing provides a simple way to access servers, storage, databases and a broad set of application services over the Internet. A Cloud services platform such as Amazon Web Services owns and maintains the network-connected hardware required for these application services, while you provision and use what you need via a web application.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Six Advantages and Benefits of Cloud Computing</span>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Trade capital expense for variable expense</span>\r\nInstead of having to invest heavily in data centers and servers before you know how you’re going to use them, you can only pay when you consume computing resources, and only pay for how much you consume.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Benefit from massive economies of scale</span>\r\nBy using cloud computing, you can achieve a lower variable cost than you can get on your own. Because usage from hundreds of thousands of customers are aggregated in the cloud, providers can achieve higher economies of scale which translates into lower pay as you go prices.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Stop guessing capacity</span>\r\nEliminate guessing on your infrastructure capacity needs. When you make a capacity decision prior to deploying an application, you often either end up sitting on expensive idle resources or dealing with limited capacity. With cloud computing, these problems go away. You can access as much or as little as you need, and scale up and down as required with only a few minutes notice.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Increase speed and agility</span>\r\nIn a cloud computing environment, new IT resources are only ever a click away, which means you reduce the time it takes to make those resources available to your developers from weeks to just minutes. This results in a dramatic increase in agility for the organization, since the cost and time it takes to experiment and develop is significantly lower.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Stop spending money on running and maintaining data centers</span>\r\nFocus on projects that differentiate your business, not the infrastructure. Cloud computing lets you focus on your own customers, rather than on the heavy lifting of racking, stacking and powering servers.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Go global in minutes</span>\r\nEasily deploy your application in multiple regions around the world with just a few clicks. This means you can provide a lower latency and better experience for your customers simply and at minimal cost.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Types of Cloud Computing</span>\r\nCloud computing has three main types that are commonly referred to as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). Selecting the right type of cloud computing for your needs can help you strike the right balance of control and the avoidance of undifferentiated heavy lifting.","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/icon_IaaS_computing.png"}],"characteristics":[],"concurentProducts":[],"jobRoles":[],"organizationalFeatures":[],"complementaryCategories":[],"solutions":[],"materials":[],"useCases":[],"best_practices":[],"values":[],"implementations":[]},{"id":3344,"logoURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/Microsoft_Cloud_App_Security.jpg","logo":true,"scheme":false,"title":"Microsoft Cloud App Security","vendorVerified":0,"rating":"2.00","implementationsCount":0,"suppliersCount":0,"supplierPartnersCount":272,"alias":"microsoft-cloud-app-security","companyTitle":"Microsoft","companyTypes":["vendor"],"companyId":163,"companyAlias":"microsoft","description":"Microsoft Cloud App Security is a multimode Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB). It provides rich visibility, control over data travel, and sophisticated analytics to identify and combat cyberthreats across all your cloud services.\r\nMicrosoft Cloud App Security natively integrates with leading Microsoft solutions. It is designed with security professionals in mind—providing simple deployment, centralized management, and innovative automation capabilities.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">FEATURES:</span>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Discover and control the use of Shadow IT</span>\r\nIdentify cloud apps and services used by your organization. Assess their risk levels and business readiness of &gt;16,000 apps against &gt;70 risk and start managing them to ensure security and compliance.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Protect your sensitive information anywhere in the cloud</span>\r\nUnderstand, classify and protect the exposure of sensitive information at rest, or leverage out-of-the box policies and automated processes to apply controls in real-time - across all your cloud apps.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Protect against cyberthreats and anomalies</span>\r\nDetect unusual behavior across cloud apps to identify ransomware, compromised users or rogue applications, analyze high-risk usage and remediate automatically to limit the risk to your organization.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Assess the compliance of your cloud apps</span>\r\nAssess if your cloud apps meet relevant compliance requirements including regulatory compliance and industry standards. Prevent data leaks to non-compliant apps, and limit access to regulated data.","shortDescription":"Microsoft Cloud App Security provides rich visibility, control over data travel, and sophisticated analytics to identify and combat cyberthreats across all your cloud services.","type":null,"isRoiCalculatorAvaliable":false,"isConfiguratorAvaliable":false,"bonus":100,"usingCount":0,"sellingCount":10,"discontinued":0,"rebateForPoc":0,"rebate":0,"seo":{"title":"Microsoft Cloud App Security","keywords":"","description":"Microsoft Cloud App Security is a multimode Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB). It provides rich visibility, control over data travel, and sophisticated analytics to identify and combat cyberthreats across all your cloud services.\r\nMicrosoft Cloud App Securit","og:title":"Microsoft Cloud App Security","og:description":"Microsoft Cloud App Security is a multimode Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB). It provides rich visibility, control over data travel, and sophisticated analytics to identify and combat cyberthreats across all your cloud services.\r\nMicrosoft Cloud App Securit","og:image":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/Microsoft_Cloud_App_Security.jpg"},"eventUrl":"","translationId":3345,"dealDetails":null,"roi":null,"price":null,"bonusForReference":null,"templateData":[{"id":95,"title":"Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB)"}],"testingArea":"","categories":[{"id":832,"title":"CASB - Cloud Access Security Broker","alias":"casb-cloud-access-security-broker","description":"A cloud access security broker (CASB) (sometimes pronounced cas-bee) is on-premises or cloud-based software that sits between cloud service users and cloud applications, and monitors all activity and enforces security policies. A CASB can offer a variety of services, including but not limited to monitoring user activity, warning administrators about potentially hazardous actions, enforcing security policy compliance, and automatically preventing malware.\r\nA CASB may deliver security, the management or both. Broadly speaking, &quot;security&quot; is the prevention of high-risk events, whilst &quot;management&quot; is the monitoring and mitigation of high-risk events.\r\nCASBs that deliver security must be in the path of data access, between the user and the cloud. Architecturally, this might be achieved with proxy agents on each end-point device, or in agentless fashion without requiring any configuration on each device. Agentless CASB allows for rapid deployment and delivers security on all devices, company-managed or unmanaged BYOD. Agentless CASB also respects user privacy, inspecting only corporate data. Agent-based CASB is difficult to deploy and effective only on devices that are managed by the corporation. Agent-based CASB typically inspects both corporate and personal data.\r\nCASBs that deliver management may use APIs to inspect data and activity in the cloud to alert of risky events after the fact. Another management capability of a CASB is to inspect firewall or proxy logs for the usage of cloud applications.","materialsDescription":"<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What is CASB?</span> A Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) is a policy enforcement point that secures data &amp; apps in the cloud and on any device, anywhere.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What is the difference between security and management?</span> Security is preventing risky events from happening, management is cleaning up after high-risk events.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What is Shadow IT?</span> Cloud applications used by business users without IT oversight, also known as unmanaged apps.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What are managed apps?</span> Cloud Applications that are managed by IT, e.g.Office 365.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What are the types of CASB?</span> Three types of Cloud Access Security Broker\r\n<ul><li>a) API-only CASB offer basic management</li><li>b) multi-mode first-gen CASB offer management &amp; security</li><li>c) Next-Gen CASB deliver management, security &amp; Zero-Day protection.</li></ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What is a forward proxy?</span> A proxy where traffic must be forwarded by the end-point Such proxies requires agents and configuration on client devices.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What is a reverse proxy?</span> A proxy where traffic is automatically routed, requiring no agent or configuration on the end-point.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What is AJAX-VM?</span> Acronym for &quot;Adaptive Javascript and XML- Virtual Machine.&quot; AJAX-VM virtualizes cloud apps on the fly so they can be proxied without agents. Reverse-proxy CASB are brittle without AJAX-VM and break frequently with app changes.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What are the types of CASB architecture?</span> There are three types of CASB architecture: API-only, forward proxy, and reverse proxy. Some CASB are API-only, others API and forward proxy. Next-Gen CASBs offer all three with AJAX-VM.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What is CASB encryption?</span>&nbsp; Encryption/decryption of data prior to upload/download to a cloud application.\r\n <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What is searchable encryption?</span> An encryption system that combines full encryption with a clear-text index to enable search and sort without compromising encryption strength.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What is tokenization?</span> Obfuscation by encoding each input string as a unique output string.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What is agentless MDM?</span> Mobile security for BYOD that does not require agents. Easy to deploy and has no access to personal data or apps, thereby preserving user privacy.","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/icon_CASB.png"}],"characteristics":[],"concurentProducts":[],"jobRoles":[],"organizationalFeatures":[],"complementaryCategories":[],"solutions":[],"materials":[],"useCases":[],"best_practices":[],"values":[],"implementations":[]},{"id":3090,"logoURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/Microsoft_Project.jpg","logo":true,"scheme":false,"title":"Microsoft Project","vendorVerified":0,"rating":"2.00","implementationsCount":2,"suppliersCount":0,"supplierPartnersCount":272,"alias":"microsoft-project","companyTitle":"Microsoft","companyTypes":["vendor"],"companyId":163,"companyAlias":"microsoft","description":"<p>Microsoft Project is a project management system and a way to optimize portfolio management, which allows you to plan and control project activities of organizations.</p>\r\n<p>Compared with other similar programs, the MS Project is considered the most common and &ldquo;easy&rdquo; to refer to the initial level of project management software with a classic standard office interface. In the single-user and small solutions market, the software product takes about 80% (about 20 million people use it).</p>\r\n<p>It is believed that as an integrated set of methods, processes and tools for planning and monitoring projects, MS Project is more often used in the implementation of relatively small project ideas. However, the existence of several paid options - basic, professional and advanced - when choosing the most complete functionality allows you to significantly expand the capabilities of the program compared to the basic version.</p>\r\n<p>Another focus of the \"detuning\" is the specialization of the product. Among such software, Primavera is popular, which is widespread in the field of engineering and construction projects as a means of calendar-network planning, which allows to take into account financial, material and labor resources in medium and large projects. Basecamp software cloud tool is considered the main competitor in the segment of ultra-light management decisions. At the same time, Microsoft has also been offering a cloud version of its product since 2013.</p>\r\n<p>In addition to the cloud application, several products are available under the Project brand:</p>\r\n<ol>\r\n<li>Project Standard allows for individual planning for small projects.</li>\r\n<li>Corporate management is carried out with the help of a special platform, including:</li>\r\n</ol>\r\n<ul>\r\n<li>Project Server,</li>\r\n<li>the corporate version of Project Professional, where collaborative tools (Project Server and SharePoint Foundation / Server) are added to the capabilities of the Standard version,</li>\r\n<li>the technology of the web interface of the reporting of executives on the progress of tasks, for viewing project portfolios and other collaboration (Project Web Access).</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<p>Source: <a href=\"https://finswin.com/projects/instrumenty/microsoft-project.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">finswin.com/projects/instrumenty/microsoft-project.html</a></p>","shortDescription":"Microsoft Project is a project management system and a way to optimize portfolio management, which allows you to plan and control project activities of organizations.","type":null,"isRoiCalculatorAvaliable":false,"isConfiguratorAvaliable":false,"bonus":100,"usingCount":14,"sellingCount":14,"discontinued":0,"rebateForPoc":0,"rebate":0,"seo":{"title":"Microsoft Project","keywords":"","description":"<p>Microsoft Project is a project management system and a way to optimize portfolio management, which allows you to plan and control project activities of organizations.</p>\r\n<p>Compared with other similar programs, the MS Project is considered the most common","og:title":"Microsoft Project","og:description":"<p>Microsoft Project is a project management system and a way to optimize portfolio management, which allows you to plan and control project activities of organizations.</p>\r\n<p>Compared with other similar programs, the MS Project is considered the most common","og:image":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/Microsoft_Project.jpg"},"eventUrl":"","translationId":3091,"dealDetails":null,"roi":null,"price":null,"bonusForReference":null,"templateData":[{"id":81,"title":"Project and Portfolio Management"}],"testingArea":"","categories":[{"id":363,"title":"Project and Portfolio Management","alias":"project-and-portfolio-management","description":"<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Project Portfolio Management (PPM)</span> is the centralized management of the processes, methods, and technologies used by project managers and project management offices (PMOs) to analyze and collectively manage current or proposed projects based on numerous key characteristics. The objectives of PPM are to determine the optimal resource mix for delivery and to schedule activities to best achieve an organization’s operational and financial goals, while honouring constraints imposed by customers, strategic objectives, or external real-world factors. The International standard defines the framework of the Project Portfolio Management.\r\nPPM provides program and project managers in large, program/project-driven organizations with the capabilities needed to manage the time, resources, skills, and budgets necessary to accomplish all interrelated tasks. It provides a framework for issue resolution and risk mitigation, as well as the centralized visibility to help planning and scheduling teams to identify the fastest, cheapest, or most suitable approach to deliver projects and programs. Portfolio Managers define Key Performance Indicators and the strategy for their portfolio.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic;\">Pipeline Management.</span> Pipeline management involves steps to ensure that an adequate number of project proposals are not generated and not evaluated to determine whether (and how) a set of projects in the portfolio can be executed with finite development resources in a specified time. There are three major sub-components to pipeline management: ideation, work intake processes, and Phase-Gate reviews. Fundamental to pipeline management is the ability to align the decision-making process for estimating and selecting new capital investment projects with the strategic plan.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic;\">Resource Manager.</span> The focus on the efficient and effective deployment of an organization’s resources where and when they are needed. These can include financial resources, inventory, human resources, technical skills, production, and design. In addition to project-level resource allocation, users can also model ‘what-if’ resource scenarios, and extend this view across the portfolio.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic;\">Change Control.</span> The capture and prioritization of change requests that can include new requirements, features, functions, operational constraints, regulatory demands, and technical enhancements. PPM provides a central repository for these change requests and the ability to match available resources to evolving demand within the financial and operational constraints of individual projects.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic;\">Financial Management.</span> With PPM, the Office of Finance can improve their accuracy for estimating and managing the financial resources of a project or group of projects. In addition, the value of projects can be demonstrated in relation to the strategic objectives and priorities of the organization through financial controls and to assess progress through earned value and other project financial techniques.\r\n<span style=\"font-style: italic;\">Risk Management.</span> An analysis of the risk sensitivities residing within each project, as the basis for determining confidence levels across the portfolio. The integration of cost and schedule risk management with techniques for determining contingency and risk response plans, enable organizations to gain an objective view of project uncertainties.","materialsDescription":" <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What’s the difference between Project Management and Project Portfolio Management?</span>\r\nProject management is focused on an individual project, making sure it achieves its objectives and adheres to cost schedule baselines and performance standards. Project portfolio management, on the other hand, takes into consideration all the projects within a portfolio. The primary objective here is to select and maintain the appropriate mix of projects and to assess the costs, risks, and returns of running these projects in relation to how they match with organizational goals. Simply put, project management is about doing the project right, project portfolio management is about doing the right projects.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What Problems Can Project Portfolio Management Address?</span>\r\nProject Portfolio Management helps companies avoid project overload and work on projects that are not aligned with the ultimate vision. In other words, project portfolio management helps companies to work towards their goals without getting sidetracked by too many shiny pennies (ie. projects that appear to be enticing but actually drain their resources for little return).\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">How does Project Portfolio Management help with new product development?</span>\r\nProject Portfolio Management supports companies in assessing, evaluating and ranking new product ideas before they become projects, so that time, money and human resources can be spent working on projects that support strategic objectives. This becomes increasingly important and relevant for companies that receive dozens if not hundreds of project proposals.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What are the key elements of successful portfolio management?</span>\r\nGoals, objectives, governance, approval processes and monitoring portfolio performance.","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/icon_Project_and_Portfolio_Management.png"}],"characteristics":[],"concurentProducts":[],"jobRoles":[],"organizationalFeatures":[],"complementaryCategories":[],"solutions":[],"materials":[],"useCases":[],"best_practices":[],"values":[],"implementations":[]},{"id":1044,"logoURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/microsoft.png","logo":true,"scheme":false,"title":"Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager Analytics solution","vendorVerified":0,"rating":"2.00","implementationsCount":2,"suppliersCount":0,"supplierPartnersCount":272,"alias":"microsoft-system-center-virtual-machine-manager-analytics-solution","companyTitle":"Microsoft","companyTypes":["vendor"],"companyId":163,"companyAlias":"microsoft","description":"The Virtual Machine Manager Analytics solution comes with some built-in reports with preconfigured data visualizations so you can easily get started with frequently used queries, such as:\r\n\r\n<ul><li>Distribution of failed jobs across VMM instances to easily scope down the broken instances.</li><li>Distribution of failures over time to find sudden spikes, and to help with correlating the cause and failures.</li><li>Distribution of failed jobs and errors to help with identifying the most error-prone jobs and the cause.</li><li>Distribution of the job runtime across different runs to identify the sluggish and error-prone jobs.</li></ul>\r\nThese are just a few examples of the possibilities with Virtual Machine Manager Analytics. Because the solution is open-source, we are looking forward to contributions from the community for other data visualizations.\r\nFurther, the data from System Center Virtual Machine Manager can be combined with several features in OMS for compelling use cases, including:\r\n<ul><li>Bring together the jobs data from multiple VMM instances to a single OMS workspace. With a view, now you can keep an eye on job details for all your VMM instances together.</li><li>Configure your OMS alerts with VMM jobs information to raise notifications for completion or failure of VMM jobs, and inform the appropriate teams.</li><li>Correlate VMM job data with other events in OMS log analytics for faster troubleshooting of failures. You can easily identify the possible causes of sudden failures on a VMM machine by correlating the VMM job logs with information from solutions like Change Tracking and Hyper-V management solutions.</li><li>Use Azure Automation runbooks with VMM job data to help enable automatic remediation for known or frequent issues.</li></ul>","shortDescription":"Virtual Machine Manager Analytics is an open-source solution that can be included in your OMS workspace. This solution brings in the job data of your on-premises VMM instances to the log analytics in OMS. VMM admins can then use this versatile platform to construct queries for searching the relevant data and creating data visualizations.","type":null,"isRoiCalculatorAvaliable":false,"isConfiguratorAvaliable":false,"bonus":100,"usingCount":7,"sellingCount":14,"discontinued":0,"rebateForPoc":0,"rebate":0,"seo":{"title":"Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager Analytics solution","keywords":"with, jobs, data, failures, Distribution, instances, Manager, from","description":"The Virtual Machine Manager Analytics solution comes with some built-in reports with preconfigured data visualizations so you can easily get started with frequently used queries, such as:\r\n\r\n<ul><li>Distribution of failed jobs across VMM instances to easily sc","og:title":"Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager Analytics solution","og:description":"The Virtual Machine Manager Analytics solution comes with some built-in reports with preconfigured data visualizations so you can easily get started with frequently used queries, such as:\r\n\r\n<ul><li>Distribution of failed jobs across VMM instances to easily sc","og:image":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/microsoft.png"},"eventUrl":"","translationId":1045,"dealDetails":null,"roi":null,"price":null,"bonusForReference":null,"templateData":[],"testingArea":"","categories":[{"id":2,"title":"Virtual machine and cloud system software","alias":"virtual-machine-and-cloud-system-software","description":" A virtual machine (VM) is a software-based computer that exists within another computer’s operating system, often used for the purposes of testing, backing up data, or running SaaS applications. To fully grasp how VMs work, it’s important to first understand how computer software and hardware are typically integrated by an operating system.\r\n&quot;The cloud&quot; refers to servers that are accessed over the Internet, and the software and databases that run on those servers. Cloud servers are located in data centers all over the world. By using cloud computing, users and companies don't have to manage physical servers themselves or run software applications on their own machines.\r\nThe cloud enables users to access the same files and applications from almost any device, because the computing and storage take place on servers in a data center, instead of locally on the user device. This is why a user can log into their Instagram account on a new phone after their old phone breaks and still find their old account in place, with all their photos, videos, and conversation history. It works the same way with cloud email providers like Gmail or Microsoft Office 365, and with cloud storage providers like Dropbox or Google Drive.\r\nFor businesses, switching to cloud computing removes some IT costs and overhead: for instance, they no longer need to update and maintain their own servers, as the cloud vendor they are using will do that. This especially makes an impact on small businesses that may not have been able to afford their own internal infrastructure but can outsource their infrastructure needs affordably via the cloud. The cloud can also make it easier for companies to operate internationally because employees and customers can access the same files and applications from any location.\r\nSeveral cloud providers offer virtual machines to their customers. These virtual machines typically live on powerful servers that can act as a host to multiple VMs and can be used for a variety of reasons that wouldn’t be practical with a locally-hosted VM. These include:\r\n<ul><li>Running SaaS applications - Software-as-a-Service, or SaaS for short, is a cloud-based method of providing software to users. SaaS users subscribe to an application rather than purchasing it once and installing it. These applications are generally served to the user over the Internet. Often, it is virtual machines in the cloud that are doing the computation for SaaS applications as well as delivering them to users. If the cloud provider has a geographically distributed network edge, then the application will run closer to the user, resulting in faster performance.</li><li>Backing up data - Cloud-based VM services are very popular for backing up data because the data can be accessed from anywhere. Plus, cloud VMs provide better redundancy, require less maintenance, and generally scale better than physical data centers. (For example, it’s generally fairly easy to buy an extra gigabyte of storage space from a cloud VM provider, but much more difficult to build a new local data server for that extra gigabyte of data.)</li><li>Hosting services like email and access management - Hosting these services on cloud VMs is generally faster and more cost-effective, and helps minimize maintenance and offload security concerns as well.</li></ul>","materialsDescription":"What is an operating system?\r\nTraditional computers are built out of physical hardware, including hard disk drives, processor chips, RAM, etc. In order to utilize this hardware, computers rely on a type of software known as an operating system (OS). Some common examples of OSes are Mac OSX, Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Android.\r\nThe OS is what manages the computer’s hardware in ways that are useful to the user. For example, if the user wants to access the Internet, the OS directs the network interface card to make the connection. If the user wants to download a file, the OS will partition space on the hard drive for that file. The OS also runs and manages other pieces of software. For example, it can run a web browser and provide the browser with enough random access memory (RAM) to operate smoothly. Typically, operating systems exist within a physical computer at a one-to-one ratio; for each machine, there is a single OS managing its physical resources.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Can you have two or more operating systems on one computer?</span>\r\nSome users want to be able to run multiple operating systems simultaneously on one computer, either for testing or one of the other reasons listed in the section below. This can be achieved through a process called virtualization. In virtualization, a piece of software behaves as if it were an independent computer. This piece of software is called a virtual machine, also known as a ‘guest’ computer. (The computer on which the VM is running is called the ‘host’.) The guest has an OS as well as its own virtual hardware.\r\n‘Virtual hardware’ may sound like a bit of an oxymoron, but it works by mapping to real hardware on the host computer. For example, the VM’s ‘hard drive’ is really just a file on the host computer’s hard drive. When the VM wants to save a new file, it actually has to communicate with the host OS, which will write this file to the host hard drive. Because virtual hardware must perform this added step of negotiating with the host to access hardware resources, virtual machines can’t run quite as fast as their host computers.\r\nWith virtualization, one computer can run two or more operating systems. The number of VMs that can run on one host is limited only by the host’s available resources. The user can run the OS of a VM in a window like any other program, or they can run it in fullscreen so that it looks and feels like a genuine host OS.\r\n <span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">What are virtual machines used for?</span>\r\nSome of the most popular reasons people run virtual machines include:\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Testing</span> - Oftentimes software developers want to be able to test their applications in different environments. They can use virtual machines to run their applications in various OSes on one computer. This is simpler and more cost-effective than having to test on several different physical machines.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Running software designed for other OSes</span> - Although certain software applications are only available for a single platform, a VM can run software designed for a different OS. For example, a Mac user who wants to run software designed for Windows can run a Windows VM on their Mac host.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Running outdated software</span> - Some pieces of older software can’t be run in modern OSes. Users who want to run these applications can run an old OS on a virtual machine.","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/icon_Virtual_machine_and_cloud_system_software.png"}],"characteristics":[],"concurentProducts":[],"jobRoles":[],"organizationalFeatures":[],"complementaryCategories":[],"solutions":[],"materials":[],"useCases":[],"best_practices":[],"values":[],"implementations":[]},{"id":1575,"logoURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/Microsoft_Dynamics_365.png","logo":true,"scheme":false,"title":"Microsoft Dynamics 365","vendorVerified":0,"rating":"2.00","implementationsCount":1,"suppliersCount":0,"supplierPartnersCount":272,"alias":"microsoft-dynamics-365","companyTitle":"Microsoft","companyTypes":["vendor"],"companyId":163,"companyAlias":"microsoft","description":"\r\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Dynamics 365 for Sales</span></p>\r\n<p>Empower sellers with insights to personalize relationships, predict customer needs, and increase sales.</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Dynamics 365 for Retail</span></p>\r\n<p>Create personalized shopping experiences that unify digital, in-store, and back office operations.</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Dynamics 365 for Customer Service</span></p>\r\n<p>Exceed customer expectations across self and assisted support with empowered agents that deliver personalized experiences.</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Dynamics 365 for Field Service</span></p>\r\n<p>Serve customers better through proactive maintenance, predictive scheduling, and first-time fix.</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Dynamics 365 for Project Service Automation</span></p>\r\n<p>Deliver customer projects on-time, within budget, and become a trusted advisor.</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations</span></p>\r\n<p>Modernize your business operations across finance, manufacturing, and supply chain to drive new growth.</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Dynamics 365 for Talent</span></p>\r\n<p>Attract the right people and seamlessly onboard, engage, and grow your talent.</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Adobe Marketing Cloud</span></p>\r\n<p>Deliver personalized experiences throughout your marketing and sales engagements at scale with Dynamics 365 and Adobe.</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Dynamics 365 for Marketing</span></p>\r\n<p>Increase demand by automating tasks from multi-channel campaigns to events with an application built on the same platform as Dynamics 365 for Sales.</p>\r\n","shortDescription":"Microsoft Dynamics 365 is unified CRM and ERP capabilities — modern, intelligent cloud applications that help move your business forward.","type":null,"isRoiCalculatorAvaliable":false,"isConfiguratorAvaliable":false,"bonus":100,"usingCount":19,"sellingCount":0,"discontinued":0,"rebateForPoc":0,"rebate":0,"seo":{"title":"Microsoft Dynamics 365","keywords":"","description":"\r\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Dynamics 365 for Sales</span></p>\r\n<p>Empower sellers with insights to personalize relationships, predict customer needs, and increase sales.</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Dynamics 365 for Retail</span></p>\r\n<p>","og:title":"Microsoft Dynamics 365","og:description":"\r\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Dynamics 365 for Sales</span></p>\r\n<p>Empower sellers with insights to personalize relationships, predict customer needs, and increase sales.</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Dynamics 365 for Retail</span></p>\r\n<p>","og:image":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/Microsoft_Dynamics_365.png"},"eventUrl":"","translationId":1576,"dealDetails":null,"roi":null,"price":null,"bonusForReference":null,"templateData":[{"id":3,"title":"CRM"}],"testingArea":"","categories":[{"id":71,"title":"CRM - Customer Relationship Management","alias":"crm-customer-relationship-management","description":"<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Customer service</span> is the provision of service to customers before, during and after a purchase. The perception of success of such interactions is dependent on employees &quot;who can adjust themselves to the personality of the guest&quot;. Customer service concerns the priority an organization assigns to customer service relative to components such as product innovation and pricing. In this sense, an organization that values good customer service may spend more money in training employees than the average organization or may proactively interview customers for feedback.\r\nA <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">customer support</span> is a range of customer services to assist customers in making cost effective and correct use of a product. It includes assistance in planning, installation, training, trouble shooting, maintenance, upgrading, and disposal of a product. These services even may be done at customer's side where he/she uses the product or service. In this case it is called &quot;at home customer services&quot; or &quot;at home customer support.&quot;\r\nRegarding technology, products such as mobile phones, televisions, computers, software products or other electronic or mechanical goods, it is termed technical support. \r\nCustomer service may be provided by a person (e.g., sales and service representative), or by automated means, such as kiosks, Internet sites, and apps.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">CRM </span>(Customer Relationship Management) is an approach to manage a company's interaction with current and potential customers. It uses data analysis about customers' history with a company to improve business relationships with customers, specifically focusing on customer retention and ultimately driving sales growth.\r\nOne important aspect of the CRM approach is the systems of CRM that compile data from a range of different communication channels, including a company's website, telephone, email, live chat, marketing materials and more recently, social media. Through the CRM approach and the systems used to facilitate it, businesses learn more about their target audiences and how to best cater to their needs.\r\nCRM helps users focus on their organization’s relationships with individual people including customers, service users, colleagues, or suppliers.\r\nWhen people talk about customer relationship management system, they might mean any of three things: \r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">CRM as Technology</span>: This is a technology product, often in the cloud, that teams use to record, report and analyse interactions between the company and users. This is also called a CRM system or solution.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">CRM as a Strategy</span>: This is a business’ philosophy about how relationships with customers and potential customers should be managed.&nbsp; </li><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">CRM as a Process</span>: Think of this as a system a business adopts to nurture and manage those relationships.</li></ul>\r\n<br /><br /><br />","materialsDescription":"<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal;\">Why is CRM important?</span></h1>\r\nCRM management system enables a business to deepen its relationships with customers, service users, colleagues, partners and suppliers.\r\nForging good relationships and keeping track of prospects and customers is crucial for customer acquisition and retention, which is at the heart of a CRM’s function. You can see everything in one place — a simple, customizable dashboard that can tell you a customer’s previous history with you, the status of their orders, any outstanding customer service issues, and more.\r\nGartner predicts that by 2021, CRM technology will be the single largest revenue area of spending in enterprise software. If your business is going to last, you know that you need a strategy for the future. For forward-thinking businesses, CRM is the framework for that strategy.\r\n<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal;\">What are the benefits of CRM?</span></h1>\r\nBy collecting and organising data about customer interactions, making it accessible and actionable for all, and facilitating analysis of that data, CRM offers many benefits and advantages.<br />The benefits and advantages of CRM include:\r\n<ul><li>Enhanced contact management</li><li>Cross-team collaboration</li><li>Heightened productivity</li><li>Empowered sales management</li><li>Accurate sales forecasting</li><li>Reliable reporting</li><li>Improved sales metrics</li><li>Increased customer satisfaction and retention</li><li>Boosted marketing ROI</li><li>Enriched products and services</li></ul>\r\n<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal;\">What are the key features of most popular CRM software programs?</span></h1>\r\nWhile many CRM solutions differ in their specific value propositions — depending on your business size, priority function, or industry type — they usually share some core features. These, in fact, are the foundation of any top CRM software, without which you might end up using an inferior app or an over-rated address book. So, let’s discuss the key features you need to look for when figuring out the best CRM software for your business.\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Contact management</span>. The best CRM solutions aren’t just an address book that only organizes contact details. It manages customer data in a centralized place and gives you a 360-degree view of your customers. You should be able to organize customers’ personal information, demographics, interactions, and transactions in ways that are meaningful to your goals or processes. Moreover, a good contact management feature lets you personalize your outreach campaign. By collecting personal, social, and purchase data, it will help you to segment target audience groups in different ways.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Reporting and dashboards</span>. These features of customer relationship management allow you to use analytics to interpret customer data. Reporting is very useful if you want to consolidate disparate data and churn out insights in different visualizations. This lets you make better decisions or proactively deal with market trends and customer behavioral patterns. The more visual widgets a CRM software has, the better you can present reports. Furthermore, a best customer relationship management software will generate real-time data, making reporting more accurate and timely. Reporting also keeps you tab on sales opportunities like upsell, resell, and cross-sell, especially when integrated with e-commerce platforms.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Lead management</span>. These features let you manage leads all the way to win-loss stage. They pave a clear path to conversion, so you can quickly assess how the business is performing. One of the main three legs that comprises the best client relationship management software (the other two being contact management and reporting), lead management unburdens the sales team from follow-ups, tracking, and repetitive tasks.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Deals and tasks</span>. Deals and tasks are closely associated with leads. Deals are leads at the negotiation stage, so it’s critical to keep a close eye on their associated tasks for a higher chance of conversion.<br />CRM software tools should also let you track both deals and tasks in their respective windows or across the sales stages. Whether you’re viewing a contact or analyzing the sales pipeline, you should be able to immediately check the deal’s tasks and details. Deals and tasks should also have user permissions to protect leaks of sensitive data. Similarly, alerts are critical to tasks so deadlines are met. Notifications are usually sent via email or prominently displayed on the user’s dashboard.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Campaign management</span>. Solid CRM software will integrate this feature to enable marketing processes from outreach concept to A/B testing to deployment and to post analysis. This will allow you to sort campaigns to target segments in your contacts and define deployment strategies. You will also be able to define metrics for various channels, then plow back the insights generated by post-campaign analytics into planning more campaigns.<br />Recurring outreach efforts can also be automated. For instance, you can set to instantly appropriate content to contacts based on their interest or send tiered autoresponders based on campaign feedback.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Email management</span>. By integrating with popular email clients like Gmail and Outlook, CRM solutions can capture email messages and sort important details that can be saved in contacts or synced with leads. They can also track activities like opened emails, forwarded emails, clicked links, and downloaded files. Emails can also be qualified for prospecting.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Social media management. </span>Popular CRM systems feature an integrated social media management where you can view different social media pages from the CRM’s interface. This is a convenient way to post, reply on, and manage all your pages. Likewise, this feature gives you a better perspective on how customers are interacting with your brand. A glean of their likes and dislikes, interests, shares, and public conversations helps you to assess customer biases and preferences. Customers are also increasingly using social media to contact companies; hence, a good CRM should alert you for brand mentions.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Mobile access</span>. With more users accessing apps via mobile devices, many vendors have been prioritizing mobile-first platforms. Emergence Capital Partners study found over 300 mobile-first apps so far and CRM is definitely one their targets. Many CRM solutions have both Android and iOS apps. Mobile access works in two ways to be highly appreciated: accessing data and inputting data while on location. Field sales with the latest sales information on hand may be able to interest prospects better. Conversely, sales reps can quickly update deals across the pipeline even as they come off a client meeting.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/CRM_-_Customer_Relationship_Management.png"}],"characteristics":[],"concurentProducts":[],"jobRoles":[],"organizationalFeatures":[],"complementaryCategories":[],"solutions":[],"materials":[],"useCases":[],"best_practices":[],"values":[],"implementations":[]},{"id":826,"logoURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/Skype_novoe_pokolenie.png","logo":true,"scheme":false,"title":"The next generation of Skype","vendorVerified":0,"rating":"2.00","implementationsCount":1,"suppliersCount":0,"supplierPartnersCount":272,"alias":"the-next-generation-of-skype","companyTitle":"Microsoft","companyTypes":["vendor"],"companyId":163,"companyAlias":"microsoft","description":"The next generation of Skype will be available on devices with Android and iOS in June 2017. Versions for Windows and Mac will be released by the end of 2017.\r\nNew Skype made a group of chat more personalized with color settings, add-ons and bots. With the \"Search\" panel in the spotlight. New Skype feature: Highlights. The main features allow you to create a highlight of your day with photos and videos so you can share everyday moments.&nbsp;","shortDescription":"Skype is software for making individual and group voice and free video calls, sending messages and files to other Skype users.","type":null,"isRoiCalculatorAvaliable":false,"isConfiguratorAvaliable":false,"bonus":100,"usingCount":8,"sellingCount":4,"discontinued":0,"rebateForPoc":0,"rebate":0,"seo":{"title":"The next generation of Skype","keywords":"Skype, with, 2017, generation, next, will, features, allow","description":"The next generation of Skype will be available on devices with Android and iOS in June 2017. Versions for Windows and Mac will be released by the end of 2017.\r\nNew Skype made a group of chat more personalized with color settings, add-ons and bots. With the \"Se","og:title":"The next generation of Skype","og:description":"The next generation of Skype will be available on devices with Android and iOS in June 2017. Versions for Windows and Mac will be released by the end of 2017.\r\nNew Skype made a group of chat more personalized with color settings, add-ons and bots. With the \"Se","og:image":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/Skype_novoe_pokolenie.png"},"eventUrl":"","translationId":827,"dealDetails":null,"roi":null,"price":null,"bonusForReference":null,"templateData":[{"id":56,"title":"Web Conferencing Applications"}],"testingArea":"","categories":[{"id":367,"title":"Web Conferencing Applications","alias":"web-conferencing-applications","description":" Web conferencing is the common name for technology and tools for online meetings and real-time collaboration. Web conferencing allows you to conduct online presentations, collaborate on documents and applications, view websites, videos, images.\r\nWeb conferences, as a rule, are Internet services that require the installation of a client program on each participant’s computer. Some services also provide access to a web conference via a browser using flash, java or a special plug-in.\r\nServices for web conferencing can include features and tools such as screen sharing (screen sharing or individual applications), whiteboard (interactive whiteboard), the ability to show web presentations, co-browsing (the ability to synchronously browse web pages), tools for annotations, monitoring the presence of participants, text chat, integrated VoIP communication, video communication, the ability to change the leader, the ability to give control over the mouse and keyboard, meeting moderation tools, feedback collection tools (on example, polls), tools for scheduling and inviting participants, the ability to record the progress of a web conference.\r\nOften, web conferencing is used with Internet services for audio and video calls (for example, Skype) or they provide conference calling via a regular telephone.","materialsDescription":" What is the first thing that strikes you when we look at businessmen who are trying to establish communication with each other online? All of them require: “Give more opportunities for web conferencing!”. Therefore, it is not at all surprising that the WebRTC technology is gaining the favor of an increasing number of small and medium-sized businesses.\r\nA recent study conducted by Software Advice showed that more than half of employees in small businesses prefer web conferences, noting their efficiency and usability. The advantages are especially noticeable in comparison with communications via telephone or the use of special applications. However, the benefits of web conferencing do not end there - according to the study, they not only increase the speed and quality of online meetings, but also provide a lot of opportunities for collaboration. In addition, and this is obvious, they reduce travel costs.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Speed ​​and quality come first.</span>\r\nIt is worth noting that now small and medium businesses are almost gone from the use of communication hardware and use desktop computers and mobile devices. Despite the fact that audio and video conferences are still very popular (they are used by 45% and 50% of users, respectively), web conferences are actively replacing them. Judge for yourself - according to statistics, every third user selects them as a means of communication after the first experience of use.\r\nThe main reason for such a rapid growth in popularity is the speed and quality that web conferencing users provide. According to respondents, the main advantage of web conferences is the ability to organize a meeting much faster than before. Now there is no need to spend time on installing special applications like Skype or similar - any communication systems using any third-party programs are a thing of the past. Also worth noting is the ability to connect to the web conference literally in one click.\r\nMore than 40% of the people surveyed showed dissatisfaction with the tedious procedure of entering authorization data, noting the simplicity and convenience of connecting to the WebRTC web conference. All you need is access to the Internet!\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">We work in a team</span>\r\nIt is no secret that the use of web conferencing significantly reduces the company's travel expenses. After all, booking tickets, searching for hotels and meeting places can result in a decent amount, which will seriously hurt the company's income. Using web conferences, you get the opportunity to arrange business meetings, even with overseas partners, without leaving your office. But that's not all! Web conferencing offers a range of tools to overcome language barriers. For example, in the field of healthcare, videoconferencing has been used to establish consultations between doctors and patients from completely different countries. With the help of online translators and other special features of web conferences, people can get the necessary help from qualified foreign specialists.\r\nDo not forget that web conferencing is not only a convenient way to hold a video call. You can arrange trainings for your team using file transfer and document display functions, as well as conduct job interviews without wasting time.\r\nIt is interesting to note that small and medium-sized businesses share their product samples with prospective clients using web conferences, turning them into a powerful marketing tool. This brings the business to a fundamentally new level, allowing the company to take a leading position in its industry!","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/icon_Web_Conferencing_Applications.png"}],"characteristics":[],"concurentProducts":[],"jobRoles":[],"organizationalFeatures":[],"complementaryCategories":[],"solutions":[],"materials":[],"useCases":[],"best_practices":[],"values":[],"implementations":[]},{"id":5957,"logoURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/Microsoft_Remote_Desktop.png","logo":true,"scheme":false,"title":"Microsoft Remote Desktop","vendorVerified":0,"rating":"2.00","implementationsCount":0,"suppliersCount":0,"supplierPartnersCount":272,"alias":"microsoft-remote-desktop","companyTitle":"Microsoft","companyTypes":["vendor"],"companyId":163,"companyAlias":"microsoft","description":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP)</span> is a proprietary protocol developed by Microsoft which provides a user with a graphical interface to connect to another computer over a network connection. The user employs RDP client software for this purpose, while the other computer must run RDP server software.</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Features:</span></p>\r\n<ul>\r\n<li>Access remote PCs running Windows Professional or Enterprise and Windows Server</li>\r\n<li>Access remote resources published by your IT admin</li>\r\n<li>Connect remotely through a Remote Desktop Gateway</li>\r\n<li>Rich multi-touch experience supporting Windows gestures</li>\r\n<li>Secure connection to your data and applications</li>\r\n<li>Simple management of your connections from the connection centre</li>\r\n<li>High-quality video and audio streaming</li>\r\n<li>Connect from your phone or use Continuum for Phone</li>\r\n</ul>","shortDescription":"Use the Microsoft Remote Desktop app to connect to a remote PC or virtual apps and desktops made available by your admin. The app helps you be productive no matter where you are.","type":null,"isRoiCalculatorAvaliable":false,"isConfiguratorAvaliable":false,"bonus":100,"usingCount":13,"sellingCount":7,"discontinued":0,"rebateForPoc":0,"rebate":0,"seo":{"title":"Microsoft Remote Desktop","keywords":"","description":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP)</span> is a proprietary protocol developed by Microsoft which provides a user with a graphical interface to connect to another computer over a network connection. The user employs RDP client sof","og:title":"Microsoft Remote Desktop","og:description":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP)</span> is a proprietary protocol developed by Microsoft which provides a user with a graphical interface to connect to another computer over a network connection. The user employs RDP client sof","og:image":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/Microsoft_Remote_Desktop.png"},"eventUrl":"","translationId":5958,"dealDetails":null,"roi":null,"price":null,"bonusForReference":null,"templateData":[{"id":136,"title":"Remote Desktop Software"}],"testingArea":"","categories":[{"id":878,"title":"Remote Desktop Software","alias":"remote-desktop-software","description":"The term remote desktop refers to a software or operating system feature that allows a personal computer's desktop environment to be run remotely on one system (usually a PC, but the concept applies equally to a server), while being displayed on a separate client device. Remote desktop applications have varying features. Some allow attaching to an existing user's session (i.e., a running desktop) and &quot;remote controlling&quot;, either displaying the remote control session or blanking the screen. Taking over a desktop remotely is a form of remote administration.\r\nRemote access can also be explained as remote control of a computer by using another device connected via the Internet or another network. This is widely used by many computer manufacturers and large businesses' help desks for technical troubleshooting of their customers' problems.\r\nRemote desktop software captures the mouse and keyboard inputs from the local computer (client) and sends them to the remote computer (server). The remote computer in turn sends the display commands to the local computer. When applications with many graphics including video or 3D models need to be controlled remotely, a remote workstation software that sends the pixels rather than the display commands must be used to provide a smooth, like-local experience. HP Remote Graphics Software is one such remote workstation solution.\r\nRemote desktop sharing is accomplished through a common client/server model. The client, or VNC viewer, is installed on a local computer and then connects via a network to a server component, which is installed on the remote computer. In a typical VNC session, all keystrokes and mouse clicks are registered as if the client were actually performing tasks on the end-user machine.\r\nThe target computer in a remote desktop scenario is still able to access all of its core functions. Many of these core functions, including the main clipboard, can be shared between the target computer and remote desktop client.\r\nA main use of remote desktop software is remote administration and remote implementation. This need arises when software buyers are far away from their software vendor. Most remote access software can be used for &quot;headless computers&quot;: instead of each computer having its own monitor, keyboard and mouse or using a KVM switch, one computer can have a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and remote control software, and control many headless computers. The duplicate desktop mode is useful for user support and education. Remote control software combined with telephone communication can be nearly as helpful for novice computer-users as if the support staff were actually there.\r\nSince the advent of cloud computing, remote desktop software can be housed on USB hardware devices, allowing users to connect the device to any PC connected to their network or the Internet and recreate their desktop via a connection to the cloud. This model avoids one problem with remote desktop software, which requires the local computer to be switched on at the time when the user wishes to access it remotely. (It is possible with a router with C2S VPN support, and Wake on LAN equipment, to establish a virtual private network (VPN) connection with the router over the Internet, if not connected to the LAN, switch on a computer connected to the router, then connect to it.)\r\nRemote desktop products are available in three models: hosted service, software, and appliance.","materialsDescription":"<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What is Remote Desktop Software?</span>\r\nRemote Desktop Software is a tool that uses Virtual Network Computing (VNC) to allow one computer to remotely access and control another computer over an internet/network connection.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">How does Remote Desktop Software Work?</span>\r\nRemote Desktop Software uses a client-server model to connect to and control a computer remotely:\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Server:</span> The server is a remote device that is being controlled.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Client:</span> The client is the local device used to control the server.</li></ul>\r\nThe server's UI is displayed on the client monitor which enables the client to control the server via keyboard and mouse inputs. These inputs are executed in the server's environment, and the UI is updated in the client's display accordingly.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Why is Remote Desktop Software used?</span>\r\nRemote desktop software is a tool that allows you to use the remote desktop feature seamlessly. It is used mainly for the following purposes:\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Troubleshooting:</span> IT Admins are on call 24/7 and a remote access tool helps them save time and effort by allowing them to fix issues remotely within a few minutes.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Help Desk:</span> Help Desk technicians' primary responsibility is to resolve any issues that customers might face while using their product, and this more often than not involves taking remote control of their customers' devices. Work from home: People that work from home often need to remotely connect to and use their corporate devices for various purposes.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Personal use:</span> You can remotely access a computer at your home when you're on the move, to access files or personal documents you may require urgently.</li></ul>","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/remote.png"}],"characteristics":[],"concurentProducts":[],"jobRoles":[],"organizationalFeatures":[],"complementaryCategories":[],"solutions":[],"materials":[],"useCases":[],"best_practices":[],"values":[],"implementations":[]},{"id":2144,"logoURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/Microsoft_Advanced_Threat_Analytics.png","logo":true,"scheme":false,"title":"Microsoft Advanced Threat Analytics","vendorVerified":0,"rating":"2.00","implementationsCount":0,"suppliersCount":0,"supplierPartnersCount":272,"alias":"microsoft-advanced-threat-analytics","companyTitle":"Microsoft","companyTypes":["vendor"],"companyId":163,"companyAlias":"microsoft","description":"<p>Advanced Threat Analytics (ATA) is an on-premises platform that helps protect your enterprise from multiple types of advanced targeted cyber attacks and insider threats by using information from multiple data-sources in your network to learn the behavior of users and other entities in the organization and build a behavioral profile about them and by leveraging ATA's proprietary network parsing engine to capture and parse network traffic of multiple protocols.</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Get peace of mind all day with advanced threat protection</span></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Detect threats fast with behavioral analytics</span></p>\r\n<p>No need to create rules, fine-tune, or monitor a flood of security reports with self-learning and advanced, ready-to-analyze intelligence.</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Adapt as fast as your attackers</span></p>\r\n<p>Rely on continually updated learning that adapts to the changing nature of your users and business.</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Focus on only important events</span></p>\r\n<p>Review the attack timeline for a clear and convenient view of suspicious activity or persistent threats.</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Reduce false positive fatigue</span></p>\r\n<p>Receive alerts only after suspicious activities are contextually aggregated and verified.</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Prioritize and plan for next steps</span></p>\r\n<p>Get recommendations for investigation and remediation of each suspicious activity.</p>","shortDescription":"ATA is an on-premises platform to help you protect your enterprise from advanced targeted attacks by automatically\r\nanalyzing, learning, and identifying normal and abnormal entity behavior.","type":null,"isRoiCalculatorAvaliable":false,"isConfiguratorAvaliable":false,"bonus":100,"usingCount":1,"sellingCount":20,"discontinued":0,"rebateForPoc":0,"rebate":0,"seo":{"title":"Microsoft Advanced Threat Analytics","keywords":"","description":"<p>Advanced Threat Analytics (ATA) is an on-premises platform that helps protect your enterprise from multiple types of advanced targeted cyber attacks and insider threats by using information from multiple data-sources in your network to learn the behavior of","og:title":"Microsoft Advanced Threat Analytics","og:description":"<p>Advanced Threat Analytics (ATA) is an on-premises platform that helps protect your enterprise from multiple types of advanced targeted cyber attacks and insider threats by using information from multiple data-sources in your network to learn the behavior of","og:image":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/Microsoft_Advanced_Threat_Analytics.png"},"eventUrl":"","translationId":2145,"dealDetails":null,"roi":null,"price":null,"bonusForReference":null,"templateData":[{"id":30,"title":"UEBA - User and Entity Behavior Analytics"}],"testingArea":"","categories":[{"id":465,"title":"UEBA - User and Entity Behavior Analytics","alias":"ueba-user-and-entity-behavior-analytics","description":"Developments in UBA technology led Gartner to evolve the category to user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA). In September 2015, Gartner published the Market Guide for User and Entity Analytics by Vice President and Distinguished Analyst, Avivah Litan, that provided a thorough definition and explanation. UEBA was referred to in earlier Gartner reports but not in much depth. Expanding the definition from UBA includes devices, applications, servers, data, or anything with an IP address. It moves beyond the fraud-oriented UBA focus to a broader one encompassing &quot;malicious and abusive behavior that otherwise went unnoticed by existing security monitoring systems, such as SIEM and DLP.&quot; The addition of &quot;entity&quot; reflects that devices may play a role in a network attack and may also be valuable in uncovering attack activity. &quot;When end users have been compromised, malware can lay dormant and go undetected for months. Rather than trying to find where the outsider entered, UEBAs allow for quicker detection by using algorithms to detect insider threats.&quot;\r\nParticularly in the computer security market, there are many vendors for UEBA applications. They can be &quot;differentiated by whether they are designed to monitor on-premises or cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) applications; the methods in which they obtain the source data; the type of analytics they use (i.e., packaged analytics, user-driven or vendor-written), and the service delivery method (i.e., on-premises or a cloud-based).&quot; According to the 2015 market guide released by Gartner, &quot;the UEBA market grew substantially in 2015; UEBA vendors grew their customer base, market consolidation began, and Gartner client interest in UEBA and security analytics increased.&quot; The report further projected, &quot;Over the next three years, leading UEBA platforms will become preferred systems for security operations and investigations at some of the organizations they serve. It will be—and in some cases already is—much easier to discover some security events and analyze individual offenders in UEBA than it is in many legacy security monitoring systems.&quot;","materialsDescription":"<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What is UEBA?</span>\r\nHackers can break into firewalls, send you e-mails with malicious and infected attachments, or even bribe an employee to gain access into your firewalls. Old tools and systems are quickly becoming obsolete, and there are several ways to get past them.\r\nUser and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) give you more comprehensive way of making sure that your organization has top-notch IT security, while also helping you detect users and entities that might compromise your entire system.\r\nUEBA is a type of cybersecurity process that takes note of the normal conduct of users. In turn, they detect any anomalous behavior or instances when there are deviations from these “normal” patterns. For example, if a particular user regularly downloads 10 MB of files every day but suddenly downloads gigabytes of files, the system would be able to detect this anomaly and alert them immediately.\r\nUEBA uses machine learning, algorithms, and statistical analyses to know when there is a deviation from established patterns, showing which of these anomalies could result in, potentially, a real threat. UEBA can also aggregate the data you have in your reports and logs, as well as analyze the file, flow, and packet information.\r\nIn UEBA, you do not track security events or monitor devices; instead, you track all the users and entities in your system. As such, UEBA focuses on insider threats, such as employees who have gone rogue, employees who have already been compromised, and people who already have access to your system and then carry out targeted attacks and fraud attempts, as well as servers, applications, and devices that are working within your system.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What are the benefits of UEBA?</span>\r\nIt is the unfortunate truth that today's cybersecurity tools are fast becoming obsolete, and more skilled hackers and cyber attackers are now able to bypass the perimeter defenses that are used by most companies. In the old days, you were secure if you had web gateways, firewalls, and intrusion prevention tools in place. This is no longer the case in today’s complex threat landscape, and it’s especially true for bigger corporations that are proven to have very porous IT perimeters that are also very difficult to manage and oversee.\r\nThe bottom line? Preventive measures are no longer enough. Your firewalls are not going to be 100% foolproof, and hackers and attackers will get into your system at one point or another. This is why detection is equally important: when hackers do successfully get into your system, you should be able to detect their presence quickly in order to minimize the damage.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">How Does UEBA Work?</span>\r\nThe premise of UEBA is actually very simple. You can easily steal an employee’s user name and password, but it is much harder to mimic the person’s normal behavior once inside the network.\r\nFor example, let’s say you steal Jane Doe’s password and user name. You would still not be able to act precisely like Jane Doe once in the system unless given extensive research and preparation. Therefore, when Jane Doe’s user name is logged in to the system, and her behavior is different than that of typical Jane Doe, that is when UEBA alerts start to sound.\r\nAnother relatable analogy would be if your credit card was stolen. A thief can pickpocket your wallet and go to a high-end shop and start spending thousands of dollars using your credit card. If your spending pattern on that card is different from the thief’s, the company’s fraud detection department will often recognize the abnormal spending and block suspicious purchases, issuing an alert to you or asking you to verify the authenticity of a transaction.\r\nAs such, UEBA is a very important component of IT security, allowing you to:\r\n1. Detect insider threats. It is not too far-fetched to imagine that an employee, or perhaps a group of employees, could go rogue, stealing data and information by using their own access. UEBA can help you detect data breaches, sabotage, privilege abuse and policy violations made by your own staff.\r\n2. Detect compromised accounts. Sometimes, user accounts are compromised. It could be that the user unwittingly installed malware on his or her machine, or sometimes a legitimate account is spoofed. UEBA can help you weed out spoofed and compromised users before they can do real harm.\r\n3. Detect brute-force attacks. Hackers sometimes target your cloud-based entities as well as third-party authentication systems. With UEBA, you are able to detect brute-force attempts, allowing you to block access to these entities.\r\n4. Detect changes in permissions and the creation of super users. Some attacks involve the use of super users. UEBA allows you to detect when super users are created, or if there are accounts that were granted unnecessary permissions.\r\n5. Detect breach of protected data. If you have protected data, it is not enough to just keep it secure. You should know when a user accesses this data when he or she does not have any legitimate business reason to access it.","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/icon_User_and_Entity_Behavior_Analytics.png"}],"characteristics":[],"concurentProducts":[],"jobRoles":[],"organizationalFeatures":[],"complementaryCategories":[],"solutions":[],"materials":[],"useCases":[],"best_practices":[],"values":[],"implementations":[]},{"id":5746,"logoURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/microsoft.png","logo":true,"scheme":false,"title":"Microsoft Teams","vendorVerified":0,"rating":"2.00","implementationsCount":0,"suppliersCount":0,"supplierPartnersCount":272,"alias":"microsoft-teams","companyTitle":"Microsoft","companyTypes":["vendor"],"companyId":163,"companyAlias":"microsoft","description":"Invite everyone you work with to chat, meet, call, and collaborate all in one place, no matter where you are.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Chat from anywhere</span>\r\nShare your opinion, and your personality. Send gifs, stickers, and emojis in a group chat or in one-to-one messages.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Meet from anywhere</span>\r\nInstantly go from group chat to video conference with the touch of a button. Teams of 10 or 10,000 can meet in one place, no matter how many places they’re in.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Call from anywhere</span>\r\nNever yell “who just joined?!” ever again. Use Teams calling, Phone System, Calling Plan, or Direct Routing to take the stress out of conference calls.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Collaborate from anywhere</span>\r\nNever do that frantic, searching-for-files thing ever again. In Teams you can access, share, and edit Word docs, PowerPoint, and Excel files in real time.\r\n\r\n<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Features:</span></span>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Meetings.</span> Meet with teams of 10 or 10,000. Host audio, video, and web conferences with anyone inside or outside your organization or go big with live events.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Calling.</span> Make clear and reliable calls. Combine Teams with Phone System, Calling Plan, and Direct Routing for business calling on a global scale.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Devices.</span> Be seen and heard wherever work takes you. Use Teams devices for more intelligent meeting and calling experiences.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Apps and workflows.</span> Make Teams work for you. Add your favorite Microsoft and third-party services or build custom apps for your unique business needs.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Firstline Workers.</span> Maximize the impact of your Firstline Workforce. Empower all workers with new scheduling and shift management features.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Healthcare.</span> Provide the best care possible with help from Microsoft Teams. Collaborate and coordinate in a simple, secure way with chat, video, voice, and healthcare tools all in one hub.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Security and compliance.</span> Microsoft Teams is designed with IT in mind, providing management capabilities for collaboration, meetings, callings, and apps in one place with simple administration.","shortDescription":"Microsoft Teams! Work remotely without feeling remote.","type":null,"isRoiCalculatorAvaliable":false,"isConfiguratorAvaliable":false,"bonus":100,"usingCount":6,"sellingCount":11,"discontinued":0,"rebateForPoc":0,"rebate":0,"seo":{"title":"Microsoft Teams","keywords":"","description":"Invite everyone you work with to chat, meet, call, and collaborate all in one place, no matter where you are.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Chat from anywhere</span>\r\nShare your opinion, and your personality. Send gifs, stickers, and emojis in a group chat","og:title":"Microsoft Teams","og:description":"Invite everyone you work with to chat, meet, call, and collaborate all in one place, no matter where you are.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Chat from anywhere</span>\r\nShare your opinion, and your personality. Send gifs, stickers, and emojis in a group chat","og:image":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/microsoft.png"},"eventUrl":"","translationId":5747,"dealDetails":null,"roi":null,"price":null,"bonusForReference":null,"templateData":[{"id":109,"title":"Instant messaging"}],"testingArea":"","categories":[{"id":495,"title":"Instant Communications Applications","alias":"instant-communications-applications","description":" Instant messaging (IM) technology is a type of online chat that offers real-time text transmission over the Internet. A LAN messenger operates in a similar way over a local area network. Short messages are typically transmitted between two parties, when each user chooses to complete a thought and select &quot;send&quot;. Some IM applications can use push technology to provide real-time text, which transmits messages character by character, as they are composed. More advanced instant messaging can add file transfer, clickable hyperlinks, Voice over IP, or video chat.\r\nNon-IM types of chat include multicast transmission, usually referred to as &quot;chat rooms&quot;, where participants might be anonymous or might be previously known to each other (for example collaborators on a project that is using chat to facilitate communication). Instant messaging systems tend to facilitate connections between specified known users (often using a contact list also known as a &quot;buddy list&quot; or &quot;friend list&quot;). Depending on the IM protocol, the technical architecture can be peer-to-peer (direct point-to-point transmission) or client-server (an Instant message service center retransmits messages from the sender to the communication device).\r\nBy 2010, instant messaging over the Web was already in sharp decline, in favor of messaging features on social networks. The most popular IM platforms, such as AIM, closed in 2017, and Windows Live Messenger was merged into Skype. Today, most instant messaging takes place on messaging apps which by 2014 had more users than social networks.\r\nInstant messaging is a set of communication technologies used for text-based communication between two or more participants over the Internet or other types of networks. IM–chat happens in real-time. Of importance is that online chat and instant messaging differ from other technologies such as email due to the perceived quasi-synchrony of the communications by the users. Some systems permit messages to be sent to users not then 'logged on' (offline messages), thus removing some differences between IM and email (often done by sending the message to the associated email account).\r\nIM allows effective and efficient communication, allowing immediate receipt of acknowledgment or reply. However IM is basically not necessarily supported by transaction control. In many cases, instant messaging includes added features which can make it even more popular. For example, users may see each other via webcams, or talk directly for free over the Internet using a microphone and headphones or loudspeakers. Many applications allow file transfers, although they are usually limited in the permissible file-size.\r\nIt is usually possible to save a text conversation for later reference. Instant messages are often logged in a local message history, making it similar to the persistent nature of emails. ","materialsDescription":" <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What is instant messaging used for?</span>\r\nInstant messaging (IM) technology is a type of online chat that offers real-time text transmission over the Internet. A LAN messenger operates in a similar way over a local area network. Short messages are typically transmitted between two parties when each user chooses to complete a thought and select &quot;send&quot;.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What kind of protocols are used in instant messaging applications?</span>\r\nTwo of the main protocols used for instant messaging in the market today are WebSocket and XMPP.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What is the difference between texting and instant messaging?</span>\r\nText messaging, or simply &quot;texting,&quot; is a cellular phone service typically limited to 160 characters, whereas instant messaging is usually a computer session with longer message size. Both text messaging and instant messaging are often called just plain &quot;messaging.&quot;\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What are the key features of instant messaging?</span>\r\nThe exchange of text has long been the chief function of instant messaging, but it is now one feature of many. The ability to insert images and emojis into messages is now standard in many clients, as are file transfers. Facebook Messenger even enables users to send money via IM.","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/icon_Instant_Communications_Applications.png"}],"characteristics":[],"concurentProducts":[],"jobRoles":[],"organizationalFeatures":[],"complementaryCategories":[],"solutions":[],"materials":[],"useCases":[],"best_practices":[],"values":[],"implementations":[]},{"id":634,"logoURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/Microsoft_SQL_Server.png","logo":true,"scheme":false,"title":"Microsoft SQL Server","vendorVerified":0,"rating":"2.00","implementationsCount":4,"suppliersCount":0,"supplierPartnersCount":272,"alias":"microsoft-sql-server","companyTitle":"Microsoft","companyTypes":["vendor"],"companyId":163,"companyAlias":"microsoft","description":"As a database server, it is a software product with the primary function of storing and retrieving data as requested by other software applications—which may run either on the same computer or on another computer across a network (including the Internet).\r\nMicrosoft markets at least a dozen different editions of Microsoft SQL Server, aimed at different audiences and for workloads ranging from small single-machine applications to large Internet-facing applications with many concurrent users.","shortDescription":"Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database management system developed by Microsoft.","type":null,"isRoiCalculatorAvaliable":false,"isConfiguratorAvaliable":false,"bonus":100,"usingCount":3,"sellingCount":4,"discontinued":0,"rebateForPoc":0,"rebate":0,"seo":{"title":"Microsoft SQL Server","keywords":"Microsoft, computer, applications, different, with, Server, software, editions","description":"As a database server, it is a software product with the primary function of storing and retrieving data as requested by other software applications—which may run either on the same computer or on another computer across a network (including the Internet).\r\nMic","og:title":"Microsoft SQL Server","og:description":"As a database server, it is a software product with the primary function of storing and retrieving data as requested by other software applications—which may run either on the same computer or on another computer across a network (including the Internet).\r\nMic","og:image":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/Microsoft_SQL_Server.png"},"eventUrl":"","translationId":635,"dealDetails":null,"roi":null,"price":null,"bonusForReference":null,"templateData":[],"testingArea":"","categories":[{"id":239,"title":"Relational Database Management Systems","alias":"relational-database-management-systems","description":" Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) is a DBMS designed specifically for relational databases. Therefore, RDBMSes are a subset of DBMSes.\r\nA relational database refers to a database that stores data in a structured format, using rows and columns. This makes it easy to locate and access specific values within the database. It is &quot;relational&quot; because the values within each table are related to each other. Tables may also be related to other tables. The relational structure makes it possible to run queries across multiple tables at once.\r\nWhile a relational database describes the type of database an RDMBS manages, the RDBMS refers to the database program itself. It is the software that executes queries on the data, including adding, updating, and searching for values.\r\nAn RDBMS may also provide a visual representation of the data. For example, it may display data in a tables like a spreadsheet, allowing you to view and even edit individual values in the table. Some relational database softwareallow you to create forms that can streamline entering, editing, and deleting data.\r\nMost well known DBMS applications fall into the RDBMS category. Examples include Oracle Database, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and IBM DB2. Some of these programs support non-relational databases, but they are primarily used for relational database management.\r\nExamples of non-relational databases include Apache HBase, IBM Domino, and Oracle NoSQL Database. These type of databases are managed by other DMBS programs that support NoSQL, which do not fall into the RDBMS category.\r\nElements of the relational DBMS that overarch the basic relational database are so intrinsic to operations that it is hard to dissociate the two in practice.\r\nThe most basic features of RDBMS are related to create, read, update and delete operations, collectively known as CRUD. They form the foundation of a well-organized system that promotes consistent treatment of data.\r\nThe RDBMS typically provides data dictionaries and metadata collections useful in data handling. These programmatically support well-defined data structures and relationships. Data storage management is a common capability of the RDBMS, and this has come to be defined by data objects that range from binary large object (blob) strings to stored procedures. Data objects like this extend the scope of basic relational database operations and can be handled in a variety of ways in different RDBMSes.\r\nThe most common means of data access for the RDBMS is via SQL. Its main language components comprise data manipulation language (DML) and data definition language (DDL) statements. Extensions are available for development efforts that pair SQL use with common programming languages, such as COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language), Java and .NET.\r\nRDBMSes use complex algorithms that support multiple concurrent user access to the database, while maintaining data integrity. Security management, which enforces policy-based access, is yet another overlay service that the RDBMS provides for the basic database as it is used in enterprise settings.\r\nRDBMSes support the work of database administrators (DBAs) who must manage and monitor database activity. Utilities help automate data loading and database backup. RDBMS systems manage log files that track system performance based on selected operational parameters. This enables measurement of database usage, capacity and performance, particularly query performance. RDBMSes provide graphical interfaces that help DBAs visualize database activity.\r\nRelational database management systems are central to key applications, such as banking ledgers, travel reservation systems and online retailing. As RDBMSes have matured, they have achieved increasingly higher levels of query optimization, and they have become key parts of reporting, analytics and data warehousing applications for businesses as well. \r\nRDBMSes are intrinsic to operations of a variety of enterprise applications and are at the center of most master data management (MDM) systems.<br /><br />","materialsDescription":"<h1 class=\"align-center\"> <span style=\"font-weight: normal;\">What are the advantages of a Relational Database Management System?</span></h1>\r\nA Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) is a software system that provides access to a relational database. The software system is a collection of software applications that can be used to create, maintain, manage and use the database. A &quot;relational database&quot; is a database structured on the &quot;relational&quot; model. Data are stored and presented in a tabular format, organized in rows and columns with one record per row.\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Data Structure.</span> The table format is simple and easy for database users to understand and use. Relational database management software provide data access using a natural structure and organization of the data. Database queries can search any column for matching entries.</li></ul>\r\n<dl></dl>\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Multi-User Access.</span> RDBMS database program allow multiple database users to access a database simultaneously. Built-in locking and transactions management functionality allow users to access data as it is being changed, prevents collisions between two users updating the data, and keeps users from accessing partially updated records.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Privileges. </span>Authorization and privilege control features in an RDBMS allow the database administrator to restrict access to authorized users, and grant privileges to individual users based on the types of database tasks they need to perform. Authorization can be defined based on the remote client IP address in combination with user authorization, restricting access to specific external computer systems.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Network Access.</span> RDBMSs provide access to the database through a server daemon, a specialized software program that listens for requests on a network, and allows database clients to connect to and use the database. Users do not need to be able to log in to the physical computer system to use the database, providing convenience for the users and a layer of security for the database. Network access allows developers to build desktop tools and Web applications to interact with databases.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Speed.</span> The relational database model is not the fastest data structure. RDBMS software advantages, such as simplicity, make the slower speed a fair trade-off. Optimizations built into an RDBMS, and the design of the databases, enhance performance, allowing RDBMSs to perform more than fast enough for most applications and data sets. Improvements in technology, increasing processor speeds and decreasing memory and storage costs allow systems administrators to build incredibly fast systems that can overcome any database performance shortcomings.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Maintenance. </span>RDBMSs feature maintenance utilities that provide database administrators with tools to easily maintain, test, repair and back up the databases housed in the system. Many of the functions can be automated using built-in automation in the RDBMS, or automation tools available on the operating system.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Language.</span> RDBMSs support a generic language called &quot;Structured Query Language&quot; (SQL). The SQL syntax is simple, and the language uses standard English language keywords and phrasing, making it fairly intuitive and easy to learn. Many RDBMSs add non-SQL, database-specific keywords, functions and features to the SQL language.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/Relational_Database_Management_Systems.png"}],"characteristics":[],"concurentProducts":[],"jobRoles":[],"organizationalFeatures":[],"complementaryCategories":[],"solutions":[],"materials":[],"useCases":[],"best_practices":[],"values":[],"implementations":[]}],"partnershipProgramme":null}},"aliases":{},"links":{},"meta":{},"loading":false,"error":null},"implementations":{"implementationsByAlias":{},"aliases":{},"links":{},"meta":{},"loading":false,"error":null},"agreements":{"agreementById":{},"ids":{},"links":{},"meta":{},"loading":false,"error":null},"comparison":{"loading":false,"error":false,"templatesById":{},"comparisonByTemplateId":{},"products":[],"selectedTemplateId":null},"presentation":{"type":null,"company":{},"products":[],"partners":[],"formData":{},"dataLoading":false,"dataError":false,"loading":false,"error":false},"catalogsGlobal":{"subMenuItemTitle":""}}