Expert Advice

Skills develop with practice and repetition. It's true of anything, from playing the piano to driving a car. In any endeavor, the way to get better is to practice. Attempt the activity again and again, learning from mistakes made along the way. "Practice makes perfect" -- that's not a way we usual...

There are two types of behavioral analytics. The first kind is "aggregate" analytics. This is what you can see when pulling reports from an Omniture or Webtrends. It shows you things like how many impressions, how many pages viewed on your website, which pages are most popular, or even the path a pr...

The challenges that all enterprises face today are numerous -- store more data, provide more services, control costs, and now monitor and manage energy costs and carbon impacts. Today there is mounting pressure on CIOs and CFOs to deliver improved services while curtailing costs. To transition IT or...

Communications as a Service. Cloud communications. Hosted PBX. You've heard the terms, and you've witnessed the hype. But what are these technologies? And what will they do for your business? Generally, a CaaS solution involves your business utilizing the resources, equipment and software of a servi...

With holiday online shopping numbers at an all-time high, retailers understand that the Web is a critical sales channel. What they might be overlooking, however, is just how influential social networks have become in the shopping process -- both online and off. As more consumers turn to the Web and...

In today's world of converged communications, businesses are relying more than ever on VoIP-based technologies to fuel work group collaboration and drive advanced business processes that are expected to reduce costs and deliver significant ROI. But successfully achieving these benefits means VoIP-b...

Salesforce.com's Dreamforce event is now 10 years old, and it's reached the stage where it draws a true sample of the Salesforce ecosystem. Of course, there are plenty of Salesforce personnel and vendors whose products work with Salesforce, but there is an increasing number of real customers. For me...

There is a great deal of commotion about the cloud, and rightfully so, but the noise can be overwhelming. The market is crowded with different products and platforms from the smallest of startups to industry behemoths, a condition that is not helped by cloudwashing and other tactics designed to take...

Companies spend a lot of money to drive traffic to their websites. Reactive live chat implementations, while highly beneficial, are similar to search engine optimization -- "the more impressions, the better." However, placing a live chat button on your website will not generate more traffic to your...

Managing an IT environment can be expensive and challenging. As a result, some companies prefer to rely on service providers to assist with specific projects. Others prefer to utilize managed services for operational work and to establish better services, processes, tools and methodologies to lever...