Content Management Matters ™

You can almost hear them now -- those marketing guys in the Microsoft corner offices -- gotta beat the competition...no...gotta squash the competition...How can we do it? Better product? No...cheaper prices...yeah!

At least that's how we think it went when Microsoft was laying out it's strategy for the release of Microsoft Dynamics Online.

They didn't win the Crunchie for “Best Enterprise Start-up" for nothing. Zoho is back at it, introducing the newest edition to their enterprise toolset -- Zoho CRM - Enterprise Edition. This enhanced version of their online CRM service is packed with features and functionality required by enterprise organizations.

IBM is not the only ECM vendor looking to leverage social networking capabilities in their applications. Looks like Oracle is getting into the game as well. In this case, it's a mix of CRM and social networking in an On Demand solution.

Sounds a little like salesforce.com's new Spring 08 release to me.

At the OpenWorld Conference today, Oracle unveiled its new line of CRM OnDemand applications.

The solutions are positioned as direct competitors to Salesforce.com's hosted enterprise offerings.

For people sick of pseudo-enterprise Web 2.0 offerings with busy functions reminiscent of Twitter and the Facebook news feed, Oracle will lend you comfort. The CRM OnDemand suite is new media but all business, with the fat and frill completely sizzled off.

The rumors are true: comment box-modding is now an industry.

JS-Kit has just released a new Comments widget that boasts lots of important features but is disturbingly easy to implement and use. (Seriously. Try it here.)

At no cost and with no advertising, users of JS-Kit Comments can:

• Monitor threads
• Create RSS data feeds to track comments. This also empowers search engines to index them
• Sort comments based on name, date and "karma" (based on user votes)

The feature doesn't cause laggage and comments materialize instantly, even without the whole-page twitch that typically happens when a site is over-AJAXed.

After trying out Comments we started checking out JS-Kit's other widgets. They include, Ratings, Top Rated and Polls -- all sound CRM tools with a professional veneer. Just pop the HTML into your site.

It's amateur-easy.

SaaS-based CRM purveyor NetSuite, managed by Oracle's Larry Ellison, filed for an auction-style IPO with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday.

NetSuite is considered a direct competitor to Salesforce, which in April bought its way into the CM space.

Even organizations with no concern for profit have Web Content Management needs, and it is this area that Convio has targeted with their next-generation content management system.

Venerable Enterprise 2.0 software vendor 37signals -- makers of Basecamp, Backpack, Writeboards, and the Ruby on Rails framework -- has just opened the front door for their much anticipated CRM'ish offering. Highrise marks a new era of simple CRM for the 2.0 generation, and we were lucky enough to get our hands on a sneak preview.

The makers of the much loved Web 2.0 Project Management Tool, Basecamp, have announced a new CRM-like application service, dubbed Highrise. Their latest application is targeted at their loyal customer base of small/medium enterprises (SME's). The hosted app will likely have tie-ins to 37singnals' other services and be based on the white hot Ruby on Rails framework that they developed.