Virus Warning and CRM News

The top story on the right (and here) illustrates one of the cruelest hoaxes around: hiding a Trojan horse program inside an e-mail promising help. While we can’t expect hackers to have any decency at all, this tactic always struck me as particularly low.

Use this warning to reinforce the policy that only one person in the company opens attachments concerning security or any other type of software. If you don’t have this policy, make it quickly. Appoint one knowledgeable technical person to be the sole contact for all such messages. Give that person the tools needed to open suspicious attachments and immediately catch and kill whatever malware lurks within. When employees get a message like this, they should forward it to your designated person, period.

The next two articles concern online sales and customer tracking software vendors. SalesForce.com, the leader by far in this space, may have let their growth overwhelm their foundation. Two reported outages in recent weeks have customers griping and complaining. I’m not thrilled with the public answers provided by SalesForce.com, but clamming up and hoping the tirades blow over rarely works well for companies. I doubt this will help them long term.

Just to make life a bit more interesting in this space, SAP announced their own CRM (Customer Relationship Management) program. Amazing stroke of luck, to announce just when the market leader suffers a public black eye, isn’t it (cue the conspiracy theory music).

If I managed ACT!, the leader in the small to medium business market for customer and sales tracking, I would immediately announce an ACT! hosted solution. Failing that, I would release new ads explaining how easy it is to migrate from ACT! to SageCRM.com, their existing entry-level hosted application. Do I hear more conspiracy theory music?