Hello Everyone, I’ve started my own corner on Engage’s blog to let you know what I’ve been up to recently, where I’m going and the fun places I’ve been. 2010 is going to be a big year with lots of CRM, Sharepoint and OCS projects and in new vertical markets. To make sure the team is staying on top of everything I’ll be traveling around to our different offices and checking to make sure we are still exceeding expectations with our customers.
There’s a show I love to watch on the Discovery Channel called To Catch a Thief. The basic premise is this: the show’s hosts find a homeowner who volunteer to have his or her security tested. One of the show’s hosts, a former thief, breaks in and robs the house. The owner comes home to a wreck and is shocked out of complacency. Then, the hosts install new security equipment and train the owner in better security practices. Finally, after a few weeks, they test the owner by trying to break in again.
Who says you can’t take it with you? Well, at least with respect to the Engage, Inc. blog for Amazon’s Kindle users, that saying certainly no longer applies. That’s right, Engage’s content is now syndicated for Amazon Kindle readers in addition to RSS, Feedburner and the like.
For the last few weeks we’ve been talking internally a lot about implicit content, that is the trail of information that internet users leave behind as they browse the web, information about preferences, clicking habits, needs, etc. Here at Engage we’ve been working on a couple of white papers about the role the Internet is playing in the new buying process and it’s clear that implicit content is playing a huge part in that. But it’s also clear that the retail and advertising indutries, the people who really have the most to benefit in harnessing implicit content, still haven’t in all instances yet learned how best to leverage it.
In the midst of a struggling economy when many companies are struggling just to keep aflot, SMBs are about to get hit by another wave. As CRN.com explains, scattered throughout 2009 are a variety of deadlines for retailers to ensure that their systems comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). The standard is meant to ensure that all businesses who handle credit information do so in a secure way, protecting their customers from the threat of identity theft.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Quick Find is a great feature which allows you to quickly search for records without the need to use Advanced Find. However, Quick Find lacks in the ability to modify the filter. For example, Quick Find will only search for active records. For some entities this may be OK but often when searching for Accounts or Contacts you may want to include inactive records.
What do you get when you combine two industries often maligned for their lack of innovation among entrentched industry participants, namely telephony and healthcare? Why, complete innovation of course! We’ve been kicking it around the office now for quite a long time and it seems a lot like the old Reece’s commercial - your chocolate in my peanut butter vs. your peanut butter in my chocolate - except it’s your healthcare needs innovative telecommunication OR your telecomm needs innovative healthcare - however you look at it, they need each other and together, they can do tremendous things.
Over the past several years I have to say that rarely (if ever) have I seen a portfolio of products as capable of helping transform industries as that which I see today. From visualization tools to collaboration platforms to IP communications and automated workflows - it’s all there in some form or fashion.
Our HIMSS team has started playing around with HIMSS Connect, the social network for exhibitors and attendees. It’s a pretty powerful socialnetwork, with built in wikis, and blogging tools etc. Already they’ve taken 3 of our posts from our main blog and embedded them in a HIMSS blog, all in about ten minutes.
Our feet our sore, and our backs ache, but we’ve survived the first day of HIMSS. And what a day it was. Even with four hours to explore the show floor between periods of assigned booth duty, we didn’t even get a chance to go to the North Hall. That will have to be one of tomorrow’s goal.
On-Demand Software (SaaS), Managed Services, Unified Communications and a whole lot more.
CRM EMR healthcare healthcare IT HIMSS IT Security Microsoft Saas social networking web 2.0
