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Surado Incorporates Project Management in CRM Products
 TMCnet Contributing Editor
Surado Solutions, a vendor of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) products for small to medium sized enterprises, has announced that its flagship products Surado Enterprise CRM 5.1 and Surado Small Business CRM 5.1 will now include project management capabilities that tightly integrate with MS Project Manager.
Introduced last August, the Project Management Features are now part of the core Surado CRM product lines. Surado CRM Project Manager includes the ability to create and manage projects, tasks, sub-tasks and associated activities.
In addition, users will be able to assign and track resources, budgets, status, project timelines and project managers. Because the Surado Project Manager is part of the core product line, it links projects to individuals and vice versa. These individuals may be users of the system and/or other third parties linked to a project.
Surado Project Manager integrates with Microsoft (News - Alert) Project Manager so users can migrate project information data between Microsoft and Surado. In MS Project, users will be able to view the project using Microsoft’s graphing capabilities. In Surado, the Projects will be linked to other areas of the CRM system to provide a true 360 degree view.
Last fall Surado announced the support of Computer Telephony Integration with ShoreTel (News - Alert) IP PBX (News - Alert) telephone systems.
Providing out of the box integration is critical for any business using CRM systems today, Surado officials think, so towards that end they company increased its integration feature set with third party applications and systems.
With CTI integration to ShoreTel telephone systems, when an incoming call is directed to an extension, Surado CRM CTI application residing on the computer is automatically alerted and pops up the Surado CRM Contact Screen for the person calling in. A variety of features are then available to the end user -- to continue working on the Surado CRM system, to put the contact on hold or to transfer to another extension.
Sundip R. Doshi, Surado CRM CEO said as more and more businesses move towards an IP based telephone system, "having tight integration between telephone systems and CRM applications is critical."
In 2005 when Surado jumped into the SMB CRM market they released a CRM suite with "all the features and functionality found in a typical contact management package such as ACT! or Goldmine, plus much more," according to company officials at the time.
"We identified a significant gap in the market," said Doshi at the time, "a small business trying to move from a basic contact management product averaging $200-300 a user, to a true CRM package generally priced closer to $1,500-$3,000 per user may suffer sticker-shock. Surado Small Business CRM provides an excellent entry package to help bridge that gap."
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims’ columnist page. Internet Protocol (IP) | X | | IP stands for Internet Protocol, a data-networking protocol developed throughout the 1980s. It is the established standard protocol for transmitting and receiving data
in packets over the Internet. I...more |
Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) | X | | CTI or computer telephony integration is the linking of computing systems with telephone systems. The caller is connected via telephone companies to a customer ACD-PBX. The ACD-PBX passes the teleph...more |
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