Page 133 - DCAP609_CLOUD_COMPUTING

Cloud Computing

Notes The interface seems to offer a lot of benefits and certainly the ability to send greetings cards is a
useful one. There are, however a whole series of issues and bugs and incomplete aspects to Plaxo
which means that it can easily be superseded as the personal CRM of choice by any app maker
able to sort out these issues more efficiently.

1. There’s no official Plaxo app on Android phones and so the synchronization goes via
Google Apps and is clunky. Whenever code word security runs out, it seems to stop
synchronizing. Also the synchronizing doesn’t seem to work well all the time and in my
case telephone numbers have been moved from one person to another, which is very
troublesome.
2. There are not really enough greetings cards and they are in too few languages.

3. Intelligent updating from the web seems not to be working half the time. Occasionally the
robot makes a half-hearted attempt to find and update people, but nowhere near what
you’d expect for the annual fee.
4. Above about 3000 contacts and the site works slowly. It is unable to offer you a print out
of the whole database at that size.
5. It often loses the pictures it has imported from facebook and doesn’t seem to be able to
import any at all from Linked In. It cannot update calendars directly to Android, again
only via Google apps.
6. It doesn’t deal properly with any scripts beyond basic Latin script, so it mangles names
written even with Polish or Czech letters, leave alone Cyrillics or Chinese names.
7. The folders are a clunky interface, but even when you have done the work of putting
contacts into the appropriate folders, they don’t carry through to the greetings cards area,
so you cannot, for instance, make a folder of people who would receive, let’s say, and Eidh
card or a more/less traditional Hannukah card and then easily access that folder from the
greetings card area. Also send outs of more than about 200 cards per time tend to fail and
need all that work to be done again.

Self Assessment

Fill in the blanks:

14. CRM custom software from ………………………………. instantly updates your business
processes.

15. ……………………. includes a web-based calendar that sales management can use to manage
the activities of all their representatives.

16. ………………… is an address book synchronising and backup tool which has a number of
interesting features.

8.6 CRM More Than Just Software

It can sometimes seem as though there really are not enough hours in each day to get everything
done. What can make matters worse is using poor and ineffective software programs to deal
with CRM (customer relationship management) as this can dramatically reduce the profits of
the business.

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