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Support - Some of the more basic support functionality found in state-of-the-art CRM packages today can be found in PeopleSoft's solution, including: multi-channel support (handles incoming web, phone, fax, or email inquiries), SLA, warranty and RMA tracking, and self-service components in the aforementioned Customer Portal. But more advanced elements are missing, including web assistance tools such as Live Chat, Collaborative Web Browsing, Call Me Now functionality, VoIP (Voice over IP), Message Boards, and Chat Rooms.

Marketing - Includes basic Campaign management (segmentation, tracking) and analysis, but little support for "closed loop" targeted campaigning that has been the hallmark of E.Piphany.

Sales - Through a portal interface, includes such capabilities as automated forecasting, lead and account management, automated quote and proposal generation, and integrated analytics. The Sales team can also access, though not update, account and order information from the field through PeopleSoft Mobile Sales for WAP Phones. In addition, anticipated for release early next year will be new mobile-ready applications, which will place roughly 500K of code on client devices so employees can access, untethered, limited content and features of the PeopleSoft 8 suite. It will employ IBM's DB2 Everyplace as the local data store.

Professional Services - PeopleSoft's Enterprise Services Automation (ESA) module includes tools to control services incoming to the company, as well as services outgoing from the company (the latter more commonly referred to as Professional Services Automation, or PSA, and typically grouped under companies' CRM solutions).

The PSA component includes project management, automated resource scheduling, as well as online staff collaboration, augmented through the announced integration in July, 2001, of eRoom's Digital Workspace, apparently indicating that the company had severed a previously-announced plan to use Lotus' Quickplace and Sametime services for the same purpose.

Open Integration Framework (OIF)

This technology foundation works through so-called Enterprise Integration Points, which are pre-built connections that allow PeopleSoft applications to share data with other applications. PeopleSoft delivers an EIP Catalog which defines its publish-and-subscribe asynchronous messaging architecture, its object-oriented, request-and-reply synchronous component architecture, and its Business Interlinks which allow access to third-party API's from within the PeopleSoft architecture.

Integration with IBM's WebSphere and BEA's WebLogic Application Servers

In July of 2001, PeopleSoft announced plans to pre-integrate IBM's WebSphere application server into its enterprise application suite. Also, toward the end of September, PeopleSoft announced that it had already integrated BEA Systems' WebLogic application server into its enterprise application suite, and that it planned on participating in the BEA WebLogic Integration Adapter program, which is based on the Java 2 Enterprise Edition Connector Architecture (J2EE CA) standard and enables standards-based inter-application integration. In fact, both solutions move the integration problem to industry-standard application servers, greatly simplifying integration efforts.


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