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Counting the Cloud's Blessings February 10, 2012 
It amazes me that there are still analyst reports and other industry studies questioning the value of today's cloud solutions. While there is no question that the return on investment will vary depending on a variety of factors, there is plenty of evidence that anyone who employs cloud solutions thoughtfully today can generate plenty of measurable and tangible business benefits.
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Customer Focus Is an All-Hands Exercise February 10, 2012 
Last week, after dropping off my Prius at the dealership for routine service -- as I've done regularly since I bought the car in 2007 -- I ambled over to the shuttle stop for a ride home. "Where you headed?" barked the driver, never raising his head from his newspaper. When I let him know where I was going, he immediately recognized me and his demeanor changed entirely.
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Mounting a Tablet in Your Vehicle's Front Seat February 09, 2012 
Factory-supplied satellite navigation and entertainment systems can add thousands to the cost of a new vehicle. Plus, the speed at which consumer electronics come to market is significantly faster than a car's development cycle, so your in-vehicle equipment is outdated before the car leaves the new car lot. Even an aftermarket OEM kit is in the thousands.
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BPM + HR = A Lean, Mean On-Boarding Machine February 09, 2012 
Let's face it, even though it's 2012 and the recession technically ended in 2009, we're not out of the woods yet. If anything, this recession has made businesses of all sizes think critically about their processes and optimize their current resources to maximize efficiency. HR processes are no exception.
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Enterprise Web Apps: The Next Generation February 08, 2012 
When the bright folks at Zeebox, a killer social TV site, decided to build their website, they naturally turned to cloud services because they are a startup and had to use their money wisely. They also turned to the Scala language and open source community because they had very specific scalability and performance needs.
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Desk.com Makes Help Desks More Mobile, Social February 03, 2012 
Salesforce.com unveiled a new customer service help desk tool this week. Desk.com works with customer requests delivered over a social network. It is the byproduct of Salesforce.com's acquisition of Assistly last year. However, it is no mere product integration, said Alex Bard, former Assistly CEO and now vice president and general manager of Desk.com.
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Setting Up a Virtual Phone System With a Little Help From Some Friends February 02, 2012 
Twilio's cloud-based communications platform allows anyone with rudimentary Web-development knowledge to build a voice and SMS text application. An API, client, and various XML and other helper code is available that lets you build in PHP, C# and more. Applications can include transcription, conferencing, voice calls confirming orders, appointment reminders, customer support and so on.
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Meeting the Productivity Challenge in a Consumerized IT World January 31, 2012 
Employees are growing more comfortable working from their own devices, particularly with the increasing adoption of portable technologies like the tablet computer. They are also accustomed to self-service delivery of applications in their personal lives, with almost instant access to apps and new services. IT managers need to learn how to get a handle on these devices rather than fight a losing battle with regulation.
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No Rest for the E-tailer January 28, 2012 
Your online store did record sales this past holiday and you are a happy person at the start of the year. After a few days of rejoicing, it is time to get back to the grind and look at how you can move forward and take your online store to even greater heights. There are a few fallouts of the holiday season that you will need to manage, and then there are some initiatives that you should plan.
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Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Slinging January 26, 2012 
Slingbox lets you watch your television remotely. The Slingbox hardware device captures the source image and audio at your home and squirts it into the Internet. Proprietary software is used to replicate a television-like experience on laptops or other devices like smartphones.
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5 Ways to Sell Salespeople on CRM January 26, 2012 
The way the concept of CRM is defined during the sales process can sow the seeds of its ultimate failure. Because the decision makers are often sales managers rather than actual salespeople, the pitch is usually made that CRM makes it easier for the managers to manage their sales staff. Which is true. But what's in it for the sales staff?
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Big Data's Big Challenges for Content Management January 25, 2012 
As many know, content is getting bigger -- way bigger -- and this is scary to many technologists. At the same time, it's also getting smarter. Applications are growing more complex, challenging IT pros as never before. How will these changes impact content management technologies? It's difficult to predict exactly, but there are insights to be found and used to plan for the future.
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A Strategy for Post-Virtualization Security January 24, 2012 
Virtualization has been one of the most rapidly and widely adopted technologies in recent memory. It's huge, and it's here to stay. And as security professionals know, setting up a virtual environment securely isn't easy. Significant effort goes into tasks like evaluating off-premise service providers, ensuring regulatory compliance, and standing up technical controls like monitoring and encryption.
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When B2C and B2B Worlds Collide January 20, 2012 
Having spent more than 20 years in the tech industry, I've seen many trends (and related buzzwords) come and go. One trend that I continue to see each year is the "consumerization of IT." While it hasn't always been referred to by that label, consumer demand has manifest itself across a variety of sectors in the industry, from PCs and email to the cloud.
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Tapping Your Smartphone's Processing Power for Classic Photography January 19, 2012 
The stumbling-block to using a phone as an all-in-one solution for photography is basically that the lenses aren't as good as those on any dedicated camera. While you would expect a DSLR camera to sport a better lens, even the most basic, sub-hundred-dollar point-and-shoots have higher quality glass than the best phones.
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Website Scaling, Part 2: The Metrics of Measuring January 18, 2012 
Measuring Web scalability is a critical component of website scaling. The way you do this in a testing environment is, of course, called "load testing." In this second series installment, I'll go over what Little's Law is and how it can be related to load testing, determining how to scale the Web and data layers. Finally, I'll share my tips for troubleshooting common scaling bottlenecks.
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