'Net Features : Software

Unleash the Power of In-Image Commerce with Stipple Shopping

Michael Garrity — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 17:25:00 GMT

With image-based content becoming one of the staple’s of a good Web marketing strategy these days, publishers and merchants, alike, have been looking for new ways to monetize their pictures.

The popular image tagging service Stipple has launched a new service that takes image monetization to the next level by allowing customers to make purchases from directly within an image with the Stipple Shopping enhancement. Now, customers can comparison shop and purchase products in-image, which saves consumers from having to discontinue their purchases or conduct laborious tasks like opening another window or re-directing.

By making it possible for shoppers to explore, compare and purchase products on social media sites and elsewhere across the Web, Stipple Shopping allows merchants to offer up a holistic experience that brings “key components of online shopping” into images and in-stream on sites like Twitter, Facebook and other leading online publishers.

Most importantly, though, is that Stipple Shopping will give consumers the chance to explore multiple product views, colors, demo videos and more. Plus, they can look at similar and suggested products and conduct purchase transactions all from within a tagged image.

Brands can leverage Stipple’s technology to share “an array of interactive content” in their relevant images. This can include real-time pricing and product information, videos and photos, among many other things. Merchants can also regularly update information by adding new videos that will be updated online everywhere the photo exists.

Stipple Shopping even allows brands to retain full control of the payment process to help make shoppers feel more secure when making purchases.

Tag Management for Non-Techie Digital Marketers

Michael Garrity — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 10:44:00 GMT

Real-time tag management system provider Ensighten wants to bring the ability to efficiently and accurately set up and manage dozens of tags across a website to even the least technically inclined marketers, which is why the company just launched its new Visual Tagger solution.

Despite the many benefits touted by tag management systems, some digital marketers and site optimization professionals have struggled to execute testing and targeting campaigns when they are required to tag pages with testing code and don’t have the technical background to do it. However, with the release of Visual Tagger, users can deploy Adobe Test & Target and Webtrends Optimize campaigns without updating any code.

All they have to do now is visit a Web page, launch the Visual Tagger through a browser bookmarklet and then define “as many test campaigns as they would like,” which includes identifying the testing locations, setting targeting criteria, passing along essential information, review all tags deployed, debugging any issues and more.

This will help “non-technical users” create a website data layer that improves the consistency and accuracy of visitor, browser and page data collection, while enhancing marketing optimization thanks to more refined data. It will also simplify event tracking, as marketers and analysts merely need to visually identify page elements to track and the events they want to pay attention to, and Visual Tagger’s built-in Adobe SiteCatalyst and Webtrends Analytics integration can easily map the analytics code for those events.

Visual Tagger is currently available for all Ensighten Manage customers at no additional cost.

The Latest Google Drive API is All About Collaboration

Michael Garrity — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 21:00:00 GMT

Earlier this week, Google launched its Google Drive Realtime API to allow developers to utilize Google Drive’s real-time collaboration features in their own applications.

According to Google, this API is meant to offer collaborative versions of popular data objects, like maps, strings, lists and JSON values, as well as automatically synchronizing and storing any modifications to these objects. Developers can even add their own custom objects and references.

Plus, since the API will track the presence of collaborators, the developers can alert users when other people join and leave, as well as when they make changes to a document.

As with Drive, the Realtime API will enact any local changes that take place when a user is in the developer’s application, and these will be immediately reflected in the local document via the use of operational transformation. In other words, local apps will continue to be responsive, even if they’re running on high-latency networks.

In addition, Google has opened up the Drive Realtime API Playground, so that developers can go in and test out their applications. To use the Drive Realtime API and gain access to the Playground, users must first sign up for the original Google Drive API.

Yammer Will Help Microsoft Office Be More Social

Michael Garrity — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 17:35:00 GMT

Taking a page out of Google’s digital book, Microsoft now seems to be trying to add a social spine that runs through all of its various software products, and it’s using its acquisition of the enterprise social network Yammer to do it.

In fact, according to the Senior Director of Microsoft’s Office Division, Jared Spataro, in a blog post published Tuesday, Yammer is the company’s “big bet for enterprise social, and we’re committed to making it the underlying social layer for all of our products.”

The first step in this process was integrating Yammer with the Microsoft Dynamics customer relationship management (CRM) platform, but it’s certainly not stopping there! In fact, this summer, the company plans to release an update to Office 365 that will let customers replace their SharePoint “newsfeeds” with Yammer, in addition to supporting single sign-on and seamless navigation from Office 365’s global navigation bar.

Included in this new, improved and Yammer-incorporated version of Office 365 will be rich document capabilities that let users integrate Office Web Apps to add editing and co-editing capabilities to Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents. Plus, by 2014, Microsoft apparently plans to initiate a 90-day update cycle for the social enhancements included in Office 365 to “combine social, collaboration, email, instant messaging, voice, video and line of business applications in innovative new ways.” In other words, the company will be able to incrementally flesh out the connections between Yammer and Office 365.

However, Office 365 isn’t the only Microsoft product that’s going to be getting a boost of Yammer. The company is also going to allow customers to replace their SharePoint newsfeeds with Yammer when conducting on-premises installations of the SharePoint Server 2013. This will, in turn, create a sort of hybrid between the two services.

Manage Those Pesky Consumer Use Taxes More Effectively

Michael Garrity — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 12:55:00 GMT

Running an e-commerce business can be taxing (literally), but the sales tax and compliance automation service provider Avalara wants to help lessen the burden with the release of a new, completely automated consumer use tax management solution known as AvaTax Consumer Use.

The new solution will work with hundreds of different billing systems, financial applications and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to ensure that it can serve businesses of all shapes and sizes by integrating seamlessly into their accounting systems.

Unlike Avalara’s older tailored consumer use tax service, this new solution provides a simple and affordable product to companies of all shapes and sizes that leverages Avalara’s powerful, accurate tax decision engine. In fact, AvaTax Consumer Use was built with a focus on small and medium-sized businesses.

In the past, consumer use tax management has been, at best, minimally supported by accounting software and ERP solutions, making the whole process not only time-consuming and complicated, but also costly. This added a substantial burden to SMB owners, as those who didn’t take consumer use tax management seriously were at a great risk, as underreported or misreported consumer use taxes “create a fertile ground for audits and penalties.”

With this new solution, tax calculations can be arranged to fit a company’s filing schedule and processed by just clicking a button; after that, all tax data will be automatically available to AvaTax Returns to further streamline the tax management process, (mercifully) eliminating complexity and saving a lot of time.

Microsoft Dynamics users will be the first to get a chance to try out Avatax Consumer Use, as the product for the Dynamics AX, GP and NAV today at Convergence 2013.

Make Your Website More Communal with DNN Social

Michael Garrity — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 18:45:00 GMT

Today, the Web content management system (CMS) DotNetNuke (DNN) announced the release of a new social software solution to help website owners optimize customer engagement and loyalty through the use of online communities, thus combining both content and community management in a single, easy-to-use solution.

The conspicuously named DNN Social product provides businesses with the ability to create and then manage social communities on their websites with the greatest of ease. In turn, the end users get a one-stop destination for consuming content, exchanging ideas and interacting with other members of the community.

Businesses that implement DNN Social can benefit from the ability to more effectively control the customer conversation than they would on a third-party social network like Facebook or Twitter, because now it will take place on a corporate website. Plus, introducing a thriving user community into a website can reduce support costs, drive product innovation and increase sales and brand awareness.

“Online communities represent a golden opportunity for you to deepen engagement with your prospects and customers in a leveraged, cost-effective way,” said Kim Celestre, the senior analyst serving technology marketing professionals at Forrester Research.

DNN Social comes with a number of features that will help enhance digital marketing, customer support, product development and e-commerce, including gamification, data analytics (along with a user-friendly dashboard), crowd-sourcing ideation and a “Q&A” customer service environment that allows users to submit, search for and answer questions.

The Business Intelligence (and Analytics) Explosion

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 18:15:00 GMT

According to recently released figures from analyst firm Gartner, the market for BI (business intelligence) software is expected to hit $13.8 billion in 2013.

While the pace of growth has seemed to slow, Gartner predicts that BI market spending globally will rise by 7 percent this year, compared to 16 percent growth in 2011. Total spending is expected to hit $17.1 billion by 2016 according to Gartner.

"BI and analytics have grown to become the fourth-largest application software segment as end users continue to prioritize BI and information-centric projects and spending to improve decision making and analysis," said Dan Sommer, principal research analyst at Gartner. "As more and more information is generated, business models need reinvention, and it's increasingly clear that mastering analytics on big data will be a key driver for the next economic cycle."

Explore Telescope for Creating Social News Destinations

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 16:00:00 GMT

It's not often that Website Magazine features open-source software (we like our software enterprise-level and commercial-grade), but every now and again, a solution emerges that warrants attention. Such is the case with Telescope, an open source social news app/website akin to Reddit (and Digg before it).

The platform, which is built with real-time Javascript framework Meteor, supports real-time updating, post categories, invite-only access, email or Twitter authentication, day-by-day digest view, posting rate limits and notifications.

There are a few interesting use cases already. Sidebar.io uses Telescope's digest view to display the five best design links of the day as curated by a team of contributors.

The software is currently in beta so expect some bugs, but if you're looking to quickly add some real-time social news to your site (and in a modern and elegant way), Telescope will be a terrific fit.

Remote Support for Private Clouds from RackSpace

Michael Garrity — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 19:15:00 GMT

The open cloud company Rackspace ranks high among major players like Amazon and Windows in the cloud computing industry, which is an impressive feat. But the company isn’t about to rest on its laurels, as it just announced a slew of new features and enhanced support offerings for its Rackspace Private Cloud Software.

Rackspace just launched Private Cloud Software in August and already thousands of businesses and organizations from more than 125 different countries have downloaded it.

These new additions have been collectively named “Alamo” and incorporate “Folsom,” the latest release of the OpenStack Cloud Software platform that came out in September and included nearly 200 new features. This is the same platform that powers the Rackspace Cloud.

Alamo has allowed Rackspace to extend its service portfolio for the Rackspace Private Cloud, particularly with a new support level – Core Software Support – that includes remote access support for the Private Cloud Software stack all day long and every day of the year. Core Software Support will allow the cloud company’s engineers login to a customer’s private cloud environment to install, configure, patch and troubleshoot, as needed.

Some other new features are highly scalable Block Storage that turns external storage into an additional storage volume and Object Storage powered by OpenStack Swift that allows customers to create “massively scalable” storage resource pools for storing files, with server images taking advantage of commodity hardware to provide reduced costs. It also provides new Monitoring that includes Graphite and Collectd applications to extend monitoring and alerting capabilities. All of these new features were designed to work in private cloud environments.

App Enhances Mobile Reading for International Users

Michael Garrity — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 20:30:00 GMT

In order to better serve an increasingly global user base, mobile software application developer YUYAO Software implemented major updates to PDF Reader Pro, the universal document solution app.

The biggest change to the application is added support for multiple languages, including German, English, French, Italian, Spanish and both traditional and simplified Chinese.

YUYAO also enhanced user's mobile reading experience by improving the app’s rendering performance and reinforcing the annotation functions, which consists of adding document stamp options and easier use of text annotation selection. Now, users simply tap and slide their fingers over the text they would like to highlight; they can even print out their annotated files for further review outside of the app.

Additionally, PDF Reader Pro still enables users around the world to optimize their workflows by blending all of the app’s features, such as the ability to save documents to PDFs, scan images to PDFs and annotate the signing of PDF forms. These features, in a single solution, are ideal for customers on-the-go and who need to access, browse, edit and share content on a whim.

To download PDF Reader Pro, you can visit the iTunes App Store for the iPad and iPhone.

The Perks of Tag Management

Michael Garrity — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 18:00:00 GMT

There aren’t many ways to simultaneously improve the efficiency and performance of your marketing, analytics and tracking systems. That is, unless you’re one of the growing number of Web companies adopting a tag management system (TMS) to implement and maintain the data collection instrumentation of modern analytics and marketing execution.

The pace and volume of tag management requirements have increased considerably and often threaten to stretch a businesses time and resources past its limits. Fortunately, a TMS can consolidate tag execution and maintenance into a single management application with added efficiency, flexibility and page-load performance benefits.

A recent study by Forrester, “Understanding Tag Management Tools and Technology,” highlights these advantages in a survey of 76 TMS users. What it found was that these systems are great for businesses with complex Web environments that are constantly changing, leverage tags for a variety of purposes, resist external support in favor of internal resources and/or lack rigorous processes, relying primarily on ad hoc tag additions and maintenance.

According to the report, 50 percent of the respondents are recent adopters, using their current TMS for under a year. (Another 29 percent have had theirs for less than two years.) And while tag management is usually associated with Web analytics, these companies have found creative ways to utilize it.

Nearly 88 percent use their TMS for Web analytics, but many also use it for search marketing (64 percent), ad serving (62 percent), affiliate marketing (59 percent), behavioral targeting (50 percent) and much more. Interestingly, 38 percent of the respondents said their marketing departments were responsible for tag management, while only 28 percent left it to their Web analytics group.

Forrester found that many TMS users “have high expectations for tag management systems,” such as condensed cycle times for adding or changing tags, faster page-load times and reduced technical skill requirements for managing tags. It seems to work, because after deploying a TMS, their ability to implement or revise tags jumps from 18 to 80 percent in a day.

This improved efficiency reduces the effort, resources and time required to add, edit and remove tags from sites. The majority of users (53 percent) said that it takes them less than an hour to implement revise a tag using a TMS, but just eight percent could do it that fast before they got one. In fact, most (52 percent) said it took them between several days and several weeks to add or edit tags until they got a TMS. Luckily, there has been an explosion of specialist and enterprise tag management vendors entering the market.

This includes major software names like Adobe and IBM, who use TMS capabilities to expand their product lines, manage data collection for their product suites and improve the manageability and cohesiveness of their solutions. As established vendors, they appeal to firms that are already deeply invested in their products, because for the most part, their tag management systems lack independence.

Some systems are considered “pure plays,” meaning they focus solely on offering highly functional and easy-to-use tag management systems. These include names like BrightTag and Tealium and are ideal for younger, analytics-led organizations still developing their support and infrastructures – and credibility.

Finally, Forrester identifies TMS marketing platforms like DC Storm and TagMan that develop solutions that support marketing capabilities. A TMS marketing platform provides broad, marketing-oriented perspectives that are great for advertisers or publishers.

Forrester does want businesses to look beyond basic features to find the important differences between vendors. This means looking at capabilities on three different levels. The first is their technical foundation, which consists of the underlying design, operation and delivery of the system, such as its infrastructure, deployment method, implementation method and support and services. Next is the application feature set, or the key components beyond functionality that drive efficiency, such as its partner ecosystem, workflow and user administration capabilities, usability and native reporting features. Last, but not least, is extensibility, which lets users leverage TMS features in multiple environments, so companies should look at environment support, platform extensions and application programming interface.

Ultimately, Forrester’s study seems to definitely point toward using a TMS to the benefit of various aspects of your Web business. Marketers continue to feel pressured to keep up as digital channels become central to customer experiences, and they’ll (likely) find that a good TMS will deliver on its promise of efficiency, helping them save time and resources normally allotted to the exhausting task of adding, editing and removing site tags. However, it is important to look closely at the vendor options available. Businesses have a wide selection of prices, feature sets and technical options to choose from, so they must find the TMS that will best meet their unique requirements.

Campaigner Hits the CRM Trail

Michael Garrity — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 17:48:00 GMT

Campaigner has long offered one of the more robust email marketing platforms for small- to medium-sized businesses, and after a while, the company began to notice that many of their customers were having trouble with their customer relationship management (CRM) services, particularly when it came to integrating their email marketing or other business-oriented solutions into the platform.

So the next logical step for Campaigner was to build its own CRM platform that would better address the concerns of its customers. The result is CampaignerCRM, an easy-to-use solution with a fully integrated suite of tools and email marketing functionality; but it’s also more than that, because Campaigner crafted the solution to help its customers sell more, meaning it’s not simply a CRM solution that just records information, but actually uses the data to help customers understand their return on investment (ROI) and make decisions that will improve their bottom line.

Still, the most notable aspect of CampaignerCRM is its backend technology integration with the company’s existing email marketing product to let customers draft, schedule and send email marketing campaigns. Before, customers would have to use two separate standalone products and attempt to make them work together, which could be difficult and frustrating. But CampaignerCRM allows users to trigger automated emails as either drip marketing campaigns or based on user actions from within the CRM.

Users can also use the service to extract customers’ names to build email lists that can be either simple (i.e. location based) or more complex (i.e. based on specific triggers, such as opens or ignores). CampaignerCRM customers can use more than 300 professional-grade templates or copy their own HTML to create their emails. Eventually, Campaigner hopes to have a completely seamless integration between its email marketing and CRM products.

Of course, no solution is complete without a variety of social media tools, and when more than 50 percent of Campaigner’s customers said they use social media to better understand their customers every week, the company knew that social was going to be a major part of its new CRM solution. This includes a new Like-to-lead tool with Facebook, which gives customers an HTML snippet that opens a pop-up box to get contact information from users who click the “Like” button on their Web properties, as well as deep integration with LinkedIn that allows users to pull and save information from a contact’s LinkedIn profile.

CampaignerCRM gives users a sales checklist feature that lets customers define their own sales processes to follow leads through different checkpoints to track their results. The ability to define these processes means that companies can replicate the practices of their best/most accomplished sales representatives to sell more (and larger) deals even faster. This can even happen on the go, as the CRM tool also comes with a mobile app that lets users update leads, contact information and more to ensure that they’re always dealing with accurate data.

These charts can be easily accessed from the CampaignerCRM dashboard, and leads can easily be found thanks to MyList, a dynamic query engine that allows customers to create customized lists for easy access. MyList is one of the software’s core product structures. It comes with a set of pre-made generic lists, but customers can create their own based on the lead types or opportunities they want to segment, and then edit its name and define its criteria. They can also easily export the lists to Microsoft Excel or a PDF document and send them to others through email or SFTP access. MyList reports can be one-time or scheduled as recurring reports run on a regular basis.

In addition to all of these helpful features, CampaignerCRM comes with visual reporting and charting functionality that helps managers anticipate trends and support salespeople, as well as Quicken and Quickbooks integration that allows users to record and close deals within the CRM and then have them automatically updated in the accounting software.

CampaignerCRM is generally available at $29.99 a month.

Inside the Mind of Adobe Muse

Michael Garrity — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 21:21:00 GMT

Two days ago, Adobe released a new version of its Muse software, part of the Creative Cloud suite that allows designers to create entire websites without having to write any code. This update adds a slew of features to the Muse platform, most notably support for contact forms, Japanese availability and Edge integration, among many others.

Muse is now better equipped to help users plan, design and publish HTML pages without use or extensive knowledge of code. For those with the foresight to have become Adobe Creative Cloud subscribers, they will receive this new update automatically and for free. This is one of the (and probably the biggest) perks of becoming a Creative Cloud subscriber, which gives customers access to new software features and upgrades as soon as they’re available. It also provides them with access to other special exclusive Web-based services, such as hosting, Web fonts and file synchronization.

Subscribers who have already installed muse can simply open up the application and click the “Install Now” button on the updater screen to access all of these new features.

Probably the biggest addition to Muse is its built-in support for contact forms, which makes it super easy for customers to add, configure and style contact forms in their site design, ultimately eliminating the need to embed HTML code from third-party online form services. Adobe says that this new feature is “just the beginning” of Muse adding “more extensive content management capabilities” by way of tighter integration with the company’s site hosting platform, Adobe Business Catalyst.

Plus, Muse now supports HTML5 animations created with version 7 of Adobe Edge Animate (formerly just Adobe Edge), which can add a deeper level of interactivity and more dynamic elements to Web pages. The upgrade even gives website designers the ability to add and link to downloadable files of virtually any type; this includes .pdf, .zip, .dmg, .exe and more. Oh, and the software now supports cascading style sheets (CSS), meaning customers no longer have to rely on images when adding effects to a website, such as glows or drop shadows.

Many of the widgets available for Muse are getting a facelift as part of this new upgrade, as well. This includes slideshow and composition widget features that offer a numeric stepper for controlling auto play speeds in seconds and a shuffle option. Also, changing a menu widget from horizontal to vertical (or vice versa) will now do a better job of preserving size and spacing. Finally, when customers change the state of one aspect of a widget during the design process, it will change the appropriate sibling parts to the same state to mimic browser behavior more closely.

And for those who use it as their primary language, the newest version of Muse is also available in Japanese.

Other new or updated features include: alignment tools that offer better layout options with panel and ruler guides; a variety of new keyboard shortcuts; drag-and-drop functionality for character, paragraph and graphic styles; FTP upload options for non-Adobe hosting users; user interface tweaks for bug fixes; and better font handling and auto-generated sitemaps for SEO, which result in faster load times and improved visibility on search engines.

For a more in-depth look at each of the features, and to subscribe to the Adobe Creative Cloud to have access to Muse, as well as a host of other Adobe software and services, click here.

Easily Convert HTML Content into PDF Files

Michael Garrity — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 06:00:00 GMT

PDF files are commonly used on many websites, but at first glance, it may seem like an unusual choice. After all, these documents aren’t nearly as accessible as more dynamic HTML content.

However, PDFs can be beneficial for some websites and content publishers, for the purposes of preserving a print format, offering an encapsulated file format, making the content easier to publish in an existing workflow, duplicating HTML content, creating more “formal” documents and more.

Luckily, publishing PDF files can be a relatively easy process thanks to software like PDFreactor, from cross-platform software solution provider RealObjects. This software is a formatting processor for converting HTML content in “typeset quality” PDF documents. PDFreactor is typically used for the server-side PDF creation of everything from dynamic data-driven documents to complex, high-quality PDFs, by utilizing common CSS knowledge and reusing investments in CSS-based style sheets to reduce costs for Web-to-print automation.

Earlier this month, the company released Version 6 of PDFreactor, which supports recent trends and changes in W3C Web Standards for HTML5, JavaScript, Web Fonts and CSS3. This new version also includes support for the HTML5 Canvas element, as well as a JavaScript engine that provides access to JavaScript libraries and frameworks, such as jQuery, Prototype, Flotr2, Modernizr and MooTools.

PDFreactor is 100 percent written in Java and can be deployed on most operating systems and application servers, which makes it easy to integrate into the majority of environments using Java, PHP, .NET, Python, Ruby or Perl API.

The software starts at $2,950 and includes support and maintenance for one year, educational or volume discounts are available. You can also try a 30-day free evaluation version here.

Manage Purchase Orders from Anywhere at Anytime

Michael Garrity — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 13:50:00 GMT

Supply chain management software provider HighJump Software is making it easier for users of the Sage 100 ERP business management software to utilize its electronic data interchange (EDI) by integrating it as a Web-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

The TrueCommerce Transaction Manager – HighJump’s EDI solution – can be added to the Sage 100 system for enterprise resource planning, and will offer users the exact same features and functionality provided by the on-premises version. It supports Sage 100 ERP’s sales order and purchase order modules, which include purchase orders, advance ship notices, invoices, goods transactions receipts, and warehouse/third-party logistics.

This integration can help systems streamline the fulfillment process to improve accuracy and meet the EDI requirements of a business’s customers, and offers the most complete, easy-to-use, and affordable EDI integration for Sage 100 ERP. Through the use of built-in process controls, users can validate purchase orders and invoices for accuracy, reduced errors, and chargebacks. They can also use the TrueCommerce Scheduler to automate and schedule a range of everyday sales and purchasing tasks, including sending, receiving, importing, and exporting EDI transactions.

Having a Web-based EDI solution allows ERP users to access the system at anytime and from anywhere without requiring additional maintenance, backup, or updates; it also saves them from having to buy extra hardware or software.