Michael Caton

When 7-Eleven Inc. wanted store employees to embrace its Five Fundamentals strategic initiative, the company looked to an enterprise incentive management application to tie employees compensation to compliance. The company previously managed store performance through spreadsheets created in Microsoft Corp.s Excel, but this process involved too many manual steps, limiting the number of people and […]

One notable downside of collaborating on Microsoft Office documents is the hidden metadata that stays behind after the editing process is complete. Workshare Technologys Protect 3.0 gives users a way to ensure that metadata disappears before broad distribution. Protect 3.0, which shipped last month starting at $25 per user, ably erases metadata from Microsoft Word, […]

With a price of less than $60 per user per month, Entelliums hosted CRM suite is a low-cost alternative to other hosted customer relationship management services, albeit with a limited feature set. Click here to read the full review of Entellium. 2 With a price of less than $60 per user per month, Entelliums hosted […]

With the latest update to SalesLogix, Best Software Inc. has improved the product beyond what a .2 release would imply. SalesLogix 6.2 includes several enhancements to customer service and sales processes while improving administration, which should boost efficiency for most users. Click here to read the full review of SalesLogix 6.2. 2 With the latest […]

Accordent Technologies easy-to-use, $15,000 Presenter Pro Enterprise Edition 5.5 lets companies quickly build and broadcast Webcast content. Presenter Pro includes four components: an encoder for creating Microsofts Windows Media and RealNetworks Real Media content, Presentation Wizard for building Webcasts, Presentation Manager for managing events, and Archive Wizard for archiving events. Presentation Wizard organizes content prior […]

Pronexus Inc.s VBSALT 1.0, the first rapid application development tool for Microsoft Corp.s Speech Server 2004, does a good job of abstracting call flow from the Web application layer and makes quick work of speech application creation. However, companies that deploy VBSALT will still need in-house speech expertise or, lacking that, an outside consultants services […]

Companies that want to broaden the range of features in telephony-based applications now have more options through speech recognition, but the new technology will require the development of greater levels of expertise. With Version 2.1 of VXML (Voice XML), the World Wide Web Consortium is about to standardize a number of improvements that consolidate several […]

Woodforest National Bank is looking at speech recognition as a way to improve customer service over its existing touch-tone telephone banking system. Based in The Woodlands, Texas, Woodforest has four 24-hour branches, and transactions completed before 8 p.m. are credited to accounts the same day, seven days a week, rather than the 3 or 4 […]

The Bloomba e-mail client from Stata Labs has been making a name for itself with a fantastic search engine, but the latest release, the $90 Bloomba Professional Edition, is a well-designed e-mail and group calendaring client that is a compelling alternative to Microsoft Outlook. I like Bloomba, which began shipping earlier this month, because of […]

Companies looking for a simple tool for collaborating on documents and Web content will find Near-Time Inc.s Flow has good document collaboration features and a low-overhead peer-to-peer distribution mechanism. However, Flow suffers from some typical Version 1.0 shortcomings, and its support for only the most recent version of Mac OS 10 certainly limits its appeal. […]