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What future do you see for social networking as part of CRM applications?

Many of the dynamics that have first emerged in consumer-oriented social networking sites will be adapted to the business world: user-generated content, micro-publishing, ad hoc teams and groups, etc. These capabilities will have to be modified, however, to support the needs of businesses. As much as we might like to imagine otherwise, for the foreseeable future, most companies will continue to have hierarchies, will continue to organize activities by project and measurable goals, and will continue to measure success via profits. This means that business-networking tools will need to provide robust security models, role-based permission systems and access controls to corporate information. A credible business-networking tool will need to offer more than just a souped-up wiki. That's why we are so excited about the business networking and content management capabilities that we have built into ConcourseSuite 5.0. Within a single application, a business can now stage and manage all of its web content, tie that content directly to contact information in the CRM, grant portal access to users, publish the product catalog that it maintains within its CRM to an integrated e-commerce system, set up workspaces for team collaboration that include discussion forums, news postings, and project plans, and more. If you add our Team Elements application to the mix (which will be completely integrated into ConcourseSuite in the 6.0 release early next year), businesses have the ability to set up external communities that can support tens of thousands of users with tools like Wikis and Blogs, RSS and other social networking tools. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. I'm excited about developments like Google's Open Social API which will lead to the ability for users of ConcourseSuite to see how contacts are connected to each other, what the strongest relationship to a new lead might be, and other interesting capabilities like that.

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