Expert Advice

Enabling people to register and check out using an existing identity from Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo or other provider is one of the most powerful tools to emerge in the last few years. Signing people in through an established online identity not only streamlines the process, but also gives your busi...

There's no question that the substantial growth of the cloud computing market has become a hot topic, generating almost as much debate and conversation as it has confusion. Many etailers have already realized the benefits of cloud computing, but the different types of public and private clouds and c...

If you've been in IT long enough, you've probably heard someone observe that, for as long as there have been computers, there has been a long, slow pendulum swing between centralized and distributed computing paradigms. From mainframes, to remote terminals, to timesharing, to PCs, to client/server,...

Most security professionals believe that endpoint security is a strategy in which security software is distributed to end-user devices but centrally managed. Endpoint security systems work on a client/server model. A client program is installed on or downloaded to every endpoint, which in this case...

Its 9:00 a.m. on Monday morning, and Fred from the ABC call center is logging onto the company's metrics portal to find out his first call resolution and average handle time. He also has access to a complete set of other metrics that provide a composite view of his performance over the previous week...

The use of analytics in contact centers enables management to extract critical business intelligence that would otherwise be lost. By analyzing and categorizing recorded conversations between companies and their customers, useful information can be discovered relating to strategy, product, process, ...

Three years after Apple launched the iPhone, mobile commerce has reached a tipping point, driving retailers to change the way they think about their businesses. Mobile commerce has evolved from its origins as a marketplace for "virtual" goods like ringtones and applications to one enabling the sale...

Branding is often undervalued. The mantra at many companies is "leads and sales, leads and sales," with most marketing investments going toward lead generation activities. In addition, marketers often believe that branding results are difficult to measure. The Internet has relegated these notions to...

Businesses will probably always have customers who want to place their orders by fax. When there are manual tasks involved in processing those orders, they can present a serious problem because companies may fall short in meeting expectations of the customers who place them. There is a fundamental c...

Just how secure is your website? How tough is your webhosting provider's backbone? How vulnerable are you to cyberattacks like those that played havoc with Facebook and other sites in the past -- the victims of a rogue blogger? While no site is absolutely safe from assault, it pays to be vigilant ...