Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM offers businesses a complete customer relationship life-cycle management solution for managing organization-wide Sales, Marketing, Customer Support & Service and Inventory Management.

• Award-winning, complete CRM solution
• No long term contracts, pay as you go
• Ease of Customization

Zoho CRM is simple to use, yet packed with features and advanced functionality that allow you to grow your business while having a single view of your customer interactions.

Sales Force Automation:
Zoho CRM helps the sales force, executives, and management with sophisticated sales force automation tools such as, lead generation & qualification, pipeline analysis, sales stage & probability analysis, competitor analysis, real-time forecasting, quota management, reports & dashboards and other useful metrics.

Marketing Automation:
With the Zoho CRM marketing automation, you can effectively plan marketing campaigns, execute email campaigns, track marketing expenditure and improve the quality of lead generation process. In addition, campaign management integrated with sales force automation helps your organization in measuring the performance, return on investment (ROI) and effectiveness of the campaigns.

E-mail Integration:
The Zoho CRM Mail Add-on automatically tracks e-mail conversations you've had with your customers. You don't need to CC: anyone or forward your e-mails to a particular address. You can also choose what e-mails to share with your team and which ones to keep private.

Zoho CRM highlights:

* 360 degree view of your business: sales, marketing, inventory, invoicing and help desk
* Modular and easy to use: Zoho CRM grows with your business, start simple expand and evolve over time

Google Announces Definite End of Their SOAP Search API

Google in a blog post discussing their new Google Code Labs overview page mentions that they’ll end the Google SOAP Search API for good on August 31st this year. So far, while it was announced as unsupported and didn’t accept new sign-ups since December 2006 already, it was still working for those who used it in their past projects. “Since then” Google says their SOAP API has “been steadily declining in usage”. In an email sent out to developers who had once signed up for an API key, Google apologized.
I’m making extensive use of the SOAP Search API over at FindForward.com, an older playground for search experiments. Perhaps one of the simplest routes to go once the SOAP API is dead is to create a module which emulates that API using Google’s REST API. Writing a screenscraping wrapper class might also be just as feasible, and it would even survive if Google decides to kill of the REST API one day; such a wrapper may also support those features which the SOAP API had but the REST API doesn’t (querying for the Google cache of a page, and spellchecking, the least).

Google UK didn’t update their SOAP API homepage yet, still showing the old version. Google originally launched the SOAP API in 2002 (according to Ionut).
When you do use the REST API, Google points out this bit: “each search performed with the API must be the direct result of a user action. Automated searching is strictly prohibited, as is permanently storing any search results.”
Companies may do well to not support dead-end projects forever. The bigger problem with Google’s ending of projects is that they rarely give you an honest answer as to why they ended something, as only that could help you on which present and future products and APIs you should bet. The answer for canceling SOAP support may be that, as the casual-API world is moving towards REST + JSON*, there’s too much overhead involved in the protocol. Here’s a bit of background from ex-Google employee Nelson Minar from November 2006:
As someone who bears some past responsibility for well used SOAP services (Google’s APIs for search and AdWords) let me say now I’d never choose to use SOAP and WSDL again. I was wrong.
The promise of SOAP and WSDL was removing all the plumbing. When you look at SOAP client examples, they’re two lines of code. “Generate proxy. RPC to proxy.” And for toys, that actually works. But for serious things it doesn’t. I don’t have the space to explain all the problems right now (if you’ve seen my talks at O’Reilly conferences, you know), but they boil down to massive interoperability problems. Good lord, you can’t even pass a number between languages reliably, much less arrays, or dates, or structures that can be null, or... It just doesn’t work. Maybe with enough effort SOAP interop could eventually be made to work. It’s not such a problem if you’re writing both the client and the server. But if you’re publishing a server for others to use? Forget it.
The deeper problem with SOAP is strong typing. WSDL accomplishes its magic via XML Schema and strongly typed messages. But strong typing is a bad choice for loosely coupled distributed systems. The moment you need to change anything, the type signature changes and all the clients that were built to your earlier protocol spec break. And I don’t just mean major semantic changes break things, but cosmetic things like accepting a 64 bit int where you use used to only accept 32 bit ints, or making a parameter optional. SOAP, in practice, is incredibly brittle. If you’re building a web service for the world to use, you need to make it flexible and loose and a bit sloppy. Strong typing is the wrong choice.
The REST / HTTP+POX services typically assume that the clients will be flexible and can make sense of messages, even if they change a bit. And in practice this seems to work pretty well. My favourite API to use is the Flickr API, and my favourite client for it is 48 lines of code. It supports 100+ Flickr API methods. How? Fast and loose. And it works great.

What is ERP?

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) combines methodologies with software and hardware components to integrate numerous critical back-office functions across a company. 
Made up of a series of “modules” or applications that are seamlessly linked together through a common database, an ERP system enables operating units such as Accounting and Finance, Human Resources, Production, and Fulfillment and Distribution to coordinate activities, share information, and collaborate. 
Learn more about ERP »

 

Tips for Managing Your ERP Project

5 Questions to Ask ERP Companies Before You Buy
There are hundreds of ERP companies to choose from – how do you know which one is right for your business?  These five questions will help you find the best possible fit.     
7 Tips to Making an ERP Software Decision
The process of purchasing enterprise resource planning (ERP) software can be a complex one, particularly for companies who have never engaged in a project of this scale or scope before. Here are some quick tips to help you find the best solution to meet your needs, and maximize the value of your ERP software.
Disaster-Proofing Your ERP Data
Your ERP data is vital to your company’s ability to maintain optimum levels of efficiency.  Learn about the threats that put your ERP data at risk, and how you can avoid them.      
ERP A - Z
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions are broad applications that improve productivity and reduce costs across the entire back office.  This article takes a look at the expansive reach of an ERP system –
from A to Z. 
ERP Benefits for Midsized Businesses
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions can deliver significant value to mid-sized companies.  With a solid ERP strategy in place, businesses can boost productivity, minimize expenses, and gain a competitive edge. 
ERP Software Key Features
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software provides a broad range of capabilities to support all critical back office functions.  With features for manufacturing, supply chain management, human resources, financial management, and more, ERP software can improve core operations across an entire business. 
5 Tips to Negotiate the Best ERP Deal
The ERP negotiation process can be quite challenging – particularly for those companies that have little experience with enterprise software deals.  Here are five tips to help you get the best ERP software for the best possible price.     
Get the Most From your ERP Purchase
Your ERP investment was a major one, and the pressure is on to get as much value as possible from your new system. Here are some tips to help you realize the full potential of your ERP environment.      
Why do You Need an ERP Solution?
An ERP solution can deliver dramatic benefits to businesses of all types and sizes – increased productivity, reduced operating expenses, improved information flow, and enhanced performance management. Why does your company need an ERP solution?  Read on to learn more.   
How to Protect Your ERP Database
Your ERP database is one of your company’s most important assets.  This article contains valuable tips to help you keep your ERP database fully protected, so you can ensure smooth, continuous back office operations.  

The Business Software

Business Software Alliance (BSA) is a nonprofit trade association created to advance the goals of the software industry and its hardware partners. It is the foremost organization dedicated to promoting a safe and legal digital world. Headquartered in Washington, DC, BSA is active in more than 80 countries, with dedicated staff in 11 offices around the globe: Brussels, London, Munich, Beijing, Delhi, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Taipei, Tokyo, Singapore, and São Paulo.
View All BSA Members
BSA’s global mission is to promote a long-term legislative and legal environment in which the industry can prosper and to provide a unified voice for its members around the world. BSA’s programs foster innovation, growth, and a competitive marketplace for commercial software and related technologies. BSA members are optimistic about the future of the industry, but believe that the future does not simply unfold. And, we agree that it is critical for companies to work together to address the key issues that affect innovation.