Remember when Bill Gates openly mocked IBM for sponsoring the “OS/2 Bowl”?

Engadget: Microsoft to spend one billion dollars

Great post from Microsoft Staffing Manager and Employee Evangelist Heather Hamilton for those 4 of you looking for a job these days…

One Louder: Finding recruiters and stalking them like a pro

Last week @ Cloudforce Seattle, Salesforce.com demonstrated some impressive Twitter integration into their Service application. From a CRM perspective, you want to know what your customers are saying whether in sales or service. For Sales, it helps get you to personal faster. For service, it helps you show the love. In researching similar and related technologies, TwInbox for Outlook looks promising.

Check this Microsoft Showcase video about TwInbox: Office Casual: How to Twitter in Outlook (with TwInbox).

The Email Standards Project has started a proverbial avalanche for Microsoft via Twitter. Check TechCrunch: Microsoft, Outlook Is Broken, Says 6,000 Tweets (And Growing). Fix It.

Also check Microsoft to ignore web standards in Outlook 2010 – enough is enough at Email Standards Project.

To get in include the http://fixoutlook.org/ URL somewhere in your tweet.

CTI integration with CRM systems is typically limited to Sales and Support offerings. Since phone systems change less often than other pieces of technology, these integrations have been “set and forget” when properly scoped. I have clients that have not touched the CTI integrations of deployments ever. These integrations are usually pretty simple in size and scope. anywhere from 3-10 fields are identified and passed from system to system. Call durations are typically returned at the end of the call for the all important “Cost per Call” and “Contact Reduction” metrics.

With more systems moving to Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics Live platforms some vendors are now offering out of the box solutions. Just one more vendor…

My current thinking is that this is a piece that could and should stay in-house, just like the phones.

I had a conversation recently with a friend and former colleague on the state of IT. A common theme was that for all the advances in technology, projects still fail at an alarming rate. This got me to think about two clients of mine. Both were large enterprise software companies and were both partners and competitors in given spaces. Both were deploying the same CRM product to increase efficiencies in their customer service centers. The situation was a perfect example of how to make a project a success and how to make a project fail.

The first company had ambitious plans to deploy across multiple product lines, across multiple service teams and integrate with multiple CRM systems. The plans were big and bold. “We will be your most successful and reference-able customer,” the executive sponsor boasted in the kickoff meeting.

The second company had calculated and negotiated their purchase price based on a cost per call metric. They had a simple goal. We have 18 months to get to positive ROI.

Which company succeeded?