Affordable CRM took another step forward today. Tactile CRM has released version 2.0 of their CRM tool for small businesses. The new release includes a number of additional features, and some refinements of existing functionality. Clients and leads are now grouped together, under the new class of ‘organisations’ (Jake Stride of Tactile CRM describes the reasoning in this post). Tagging capabilities have now been added (examples on the Tactile blog).

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Last Thursday night saw the second CloudCamp in London. The first one spawned: Nailing down the Cloud - A Definition for Cloud Computing? and this one was a sell-out gig, with the venue packed to capacity.

The fact that a few hundred people came out on a cold wet London night to discuss Cloud Computing is a testimony to the growing fascination with all things cloud-like. One way or another, it is a phenomenon that will disrupt the status quo in software and service provision.

The evening kicked off with a set of speedy presentations: 5 minutes per presenter, brutally speedy. Their velocity and compactness made them hard to summarize, but let me try: [more...]

TechwiseTV is running ran a webinar on UC and collaboration, together with a real-time conversation via Twitter, (under the tag #twtv): “Pushing the Boundaries of Collaboration”

I am of the view that effective communication and collaboration tools are the best competitive weapon that any business can have. As the description of the webinar said, “[they] overcome the technology walls between organizations, while preserving security.” [more...]

When I last spoke with  F5 Networks (F5 Networks - A Case of Applications and the Network) it was clear that they were getting more focussed on the higher application layers. Our discussion touched on Secerno, a specialist database security company based out of the UK. Today the two companies have announced a joint solution which should be of interest to anyone building web-based applications that have a database back-end. [more...]

Yesterday was spent huddled up in a Dockland’s hotel in London, discussing issues of identity management. The Whitehall Media IDM2008 event brought together public and private sector experts to talk about the big, and little, challenges of identity assurance in today’s IT infrastructures. 

From document management to remote access, compliance to shiny web 2.0 style portals, identity management is central to running a secure and efficient IT infrastructure. All the more distressing that it is also one of the most problematic elements of business IT architectures, with forests of directory trees and multiple ‘authoritative’ information sources. Now is the time to get that sorted out. [more...]