Businesses increasingly want to be able to collaborate in ways that go beyond simple email or IM. These collaborative relationships can form between workgroups within an enterprise, with "connected partners," and, of course, with customers. We have put a lot of effort--and will continue to put a lot of effort--into making these types of collaborations easier and more productive. We have customers such as franchisors who want their franchisees to be able to seamlessly trade contacts and leads, for example, or contribute names to a corporate database for an outbound marketing campaign. It makes sense for them to be able to do so directly from within the tool that they use to manage their contact lists, for example, and so that is the kind of thing that we are enabling. A key new capability that we are providing in the 5.0 release is support for Portlets. This essentially makes ConcourseSuite a platform for 3rd party applications. Unlike some other vendors platform efforts which rely on proprietary standards and programming languages or run in so called "walled gardens," the Portlet standard is an industry open standard that any developer can code to. Portlets can be as simple as little graphical dashboards, or as complicated as applications that integrate data from multiple legacy systems. We already have customers and partners who are using this platform capability to deliver highly customized functionality that shares data between various systems in a way that would otherwise involve very laborious and expensive programming.

So, if I were to summarize the things that we are excited about with the 5.0 release of ConcourseSuite, it would be these four things: the tool provides much more than "just CRM" capabilities; it is radically flexible in how it can be deployed (on premise, on demand, on virtually any combination of operating systems or middleware); it is enterprise class and can scale to very large numbers of users; and it provides an open platform for additional development.