(David Taber, NetworkWorld) If a significant CRM system project is on your agenda in this new fiscal year, here are checklist items that you need to look out for in vendor proposals.

10 Things You Want:
1. A project plan focused on user adoption
2. Incremental delivery
3. Adaptive pricing
4. Domain knowledge
5. References in your industry
6. Integration with marketing automation
7. Integration with your email and phone systems
8. Data quality, data conversion, appropriate history
9. Mobile (read: iPad/Android/BlackBerry)
10. Social Media Integration

(Stuart Corner, ITWire) The need to integrate mainstream enterprise applications such as ERP and CRM with unified communications services and make them accessible from any device, anywhere will drive all these applications into the cloud over the next few years.

Verizon Business' UC practice manager, Ben Green, says that the 'unified communications as a service' (UCaaS) platform of the future will provide a full suite of communications services, such as hosted IP telephony, voicemail, email, instant messaging and presence, but more importantly will interface readily to other applications such as ERP and CRM, virtualised and running in the cloud.

He sees this integration as "the next revolution" in unified communications services but predicts that is will likely be around 2015 before the first large scale adoptions take place.

(Andy Moon, TechRepublic) A new survey found that only 8% of businesses (small, medium, and enterprise) have any current plans to utilize cloud storage and only 3% are using it now. These results suggest that, while there is a lot of potential for cloud storage, concerns about privacy, security, and pricing are keeping most companies from moving data out of their data centers, at least as a primary storage option.

Forrester analyst Andrew Reichman writes in the report that “there is long-term potential for storage-as-a-service, but Forrester sees issues with guaranteed service levels, security, chain of custody, shared tenancy, and long-term pricing as significant barriers that still need to be addressed before it takes off in any meaningful way.”

One interesting finding of the survey is that companies are more interested in the cloud for back-up storage rather than general purpose storage, which requires a much smaller leap of faith and is far easier to implement than remote primary storage.

Free email services based on Web-centric platforms have long been used as advertising delivery agents. This hybrid approach to compensating for the expenses of running a free service has opened the door to a brand new and very useful customer information strategy that can be used to your full advantage, no matter what messaging environment you have deployed.

Third-party Content Delivery
Third-party content is usually represented by certain regions of an Axigen WebMail page that display content (usually targeted content) which is loaded dynamically either based on the user’s current activity, the account status or on the history of the user’s behavior. The content to be loaded resides in a third-party location in most situations, but local content (stored on the same server) is not excluded. It is referred to as third-party content to underline the ability to load external information into local pages and is unrelated to any limitation in this respect.


The actual information can consist of any HTML page or content that can be rendered in HTML by the Web browser. This includes the more visible  images, buttons, forms, JavaScript code and Java applets (client side) content and less obvious Flash or Silverlight interactive content.

Service Provider Hosting Is Possible

The simple concept of hosted services, already known and widely used for enterprise environments for quite some time, represents the perfect solution for a great number of small and medium sized companies that require a safe and reasonably priced platform. Applying the same concept at a higher level could result in Hosting and Service Providers leasing or renting virtual real-estate for the services they provide in order to lower their initial investments or subsequent upgrade costs.


Hosted hosting could bring the advantages that hosted services usually create for enterprises to SPs’ own tier and optimize their resource usage to the maximum extent possible. This also goes to prove there is a need for a new breed of hosting services, especially aimed at large SPs requiring large storage and server farms. Moreover, hosted hosting would improve the overall service quality since those companies hosting Service Providers would only have to manage the platform, leaving the service to the provider.

This increase in quality will very much appeal to the customer or subscriber base, as no one can ever turn down a better deal for the same price. What’s more important, even services on offer could get a lot cheaper as the SP would only pay a fraction of the cost each month and only for the resources it requires, changing its subscription plan based on the usage rates of its services.

Web-based email may be exposing you to privacy and security problems you didn't expect

Web-based email is booming. Services such as Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail are convenient, accessible and, best of all, free. Many of us have come to rely on them without giving it a second thought.

But second thoughts may be in order, according to security experts, privacy advocates and some Webmail users. Few consider the fact that Webmail is inherently different than POP3 email. It differs in who administers it and how, in the ways it may be vulnerable to hacking, and in the type of help you can expect when you have a problem.

You may not think these differences matter. And they don't -- unless they end up biting you in the backside. For example, the most popular Webmail services are prime targets of malicious hackers. Some Webmail users run into mysterious technical problems that are never explained or solved. And most Webmail users never really know where their data is being stored or for how long -- or how well it is being safeguarded.

An article by Tam Harbert, ComputerWorld.com.au

I have recently learned that Mozilla Corp. had made available the Alpha 8 version of their famous browser, Firefox 3. Naturally, I was very interested in the new features provided and how the next generation of the browsing technology would make my experience on the web better. My excitement instantly disappeared after reading the title of the article, but I kept on reading anyway, just to make sure I got a clear picture of what was really going on.