At the Microsoft Ignite 2015 conference last month, the company showcased the latest iteration of its Office suite. Here’s a quick look at what you can expect. Each month I compile lists of five apps that fall into various categories, such as apps to save you airfare, process monitors, and tools for protecting online privacy. This time around, however, I wanted to do something a little bit different and give you a glimpse of five applications that will eventually make up Microsoft Office 2016. 1: Word 2016 Microsoft is introducing…

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In this series, professionals debate the state – and future – of their industry. Recently, some current and former executives from Twitter came together to start an angel fund. When asked about the fact that the group was made up of all women, the awesome, gluten-free April Underwood told Fast Company: “No one takes note when a group of men decide to start an angel investing group or a fund. [And] it would be great if one day that’s not the most notable thing when a group of women get…

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Global CRM Market Up 13 Percent In 2012 Gartner, Inc. conducted an extensive survey of chief executive officers, which reported that CEOs rate customer relationship management (CRM) as “…the most important area of investment to improve their business.” That year, revenue from the global CRM market totaled just over $12 billion. The latest report from Gartner now shows the worldwide CRM software market hitting $23.2 billion in 2014. This represents an increase of over thirteen percent from the previous year. Image: The Citrix Blog Salesforce.com, a leading provider of cloud-based…

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When it comes to corporate sales, executives and salespeople can be impatient about technology deployments that could affect the sales cycle. They want technologies that can help them reach more customers and close more deals, but they don’t want technology issues to sit between them and closing their next deal. Here are five ways to speed up customer relationship management (CRM) deployments for your sales department. Go Cloud First with CRM Among the many benefits of going with a cloud-based CRM platform is the low barrier to entry (no hardware…

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Engineer to order (ETO) manufacturing has been around for as long as manufacturing has been around. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) has been around in one form or another for almost as long. What’s slightly newer is ERP for ETO manufacturing. In the past, ETO manufacturers either had to code an ERP application to meet their specific needs or, as was more often the case, they did everything manually. Manual processes in today’s manufacturing market are the kiss of death. Any manufacturing business must be agile, responsive, and lean, but for…

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The employees at Microsoft’s research centre in Serbia are celebrating its 10th anniversary but it’s a fair bet that, unless you’re Serbian, you didn’t know that one of the world’s largest software companies has a significant presence there. I spoke by phone to Dragan Tomic, principal group manager of the Microsoft Development Center Serbia, about the work done in this country of seven million people at the nexus of central and south-eastern Europe. First, I ask him, why Serbia? The Serbs gave us the genius of Nikola Tesla (and modern…

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