Dow Jones Announces CRM-Compatible Factiva Platform

By David Sims

TMCnet Contributing Editor

 

Dow Jones & Company has announced today a new platform capability that offers a range of flexible integration options for Factiva SalesWorks, their collection of company, industry and executive news and information designed specifically to help salespeople increase productivity.

 

The integration options are currently available in beta to Factiva SalesWorks customers. Organizations can use the platform to configure business information to deploy to a portal, intranet or CRM, or as a widget, to meet their specific business requirements.

 

The simplified integration capability uses Web 2.0 technologies, which allow organizations to focus less on complex Web services development and more on implementing sales intelligence.

 

Additionally, developers will be able to use JavaScript Object Notation and a Representational State Transfer-like model, a simple, lightweight data format better suited to Web development. By supporting JavaScript more natively, company officials believe, integration of rich business information and sales intelligence is "more accessible via client-side browser development as opposed to complex server-side development."

 

According to industry analyst firm, IDC (News - Alert), most business professionals spend upwards of 25% of their work week looking for internal and external information. Salespeople are always interested in products to help them spend less time searching for information they need to better prepare for calls and identify and qualify prospects.

 

Early this year Dow Jones has announced details of its plans to enhance Factiva SalesWorks for salesforce.com's AppExchange to use features available in Salesforce Winter '07.

 

Salesforce.com (News - Alert) customers will be able to get "a sales intelligence tool that includes improved navigation and the ability to produce company and executive lists for prospecting and upselling of accounts," according to DJ officials. The updated version of Factiva SalesWorks for AppExchange was made available in March 2007.

 

Factiva SalesWorks enhancements for salesforce.com's AppExchange allow users to generate lists of company or executive leads from within the Salesforce interface. Companies can be filtered by location, industry or company ownership, and executive information can be sorted by job title, company location and industry.

 

Factiva SalesWorks provides content from news providers such as Dow Jones and Reuters and business information from Reuters Fundamentals, D&B, Datamonitor, ZoomInfo, Hemscott, Standard & Poor's, Mergent, Investext, Thomson (News - Alert) Financial, Jobson's, Marquis Who's Who, Freedonia, IBISWorld Business Information, MarketResearch.com, and others.