CDC Software (News - Alert) has announced the general availability of Pivotal CRM 6.0, described by company officials as "a newly-designed customer relationship management platform based on Microsoft.NET (News - Alert) technology."

 

Pivotal CRM 6.0 has a redesigned platform giving users out-of-the box, task-based navigation, forms and portals with "the look and feel of Microsoft (News - Alert) applications," and "which have the ability to model complex workflow," the Pivotal officials say.

 

Pivotal 6.0 is integrated with Microsoft Outlook (including calendaring, task and e-mail capabilities) within the platform.

 

Mark Williams, CRM architect and team leader at CareerBuilder.com, noted that using the system he was able to "configure the new 'Links' feature to see my Pivotal contacts in Outlook, and I got 'Activities' to show up in both places with bi-directional synching."

 

Pivotal 6.0 also embeds SharePoint, which lets users deploy SharePoint Server 2007 with SharePoint Designer 2007, and lets them implement a new feature in Pivotal 6.0 called SmartPortal, a Pivotal portal which allows IT professionals to set-up pre-defined portals by functional area.

 

For example, a portal can be designed for sales people, customer support representative and others specific to groups within an organization. End users, including mobile users, can then personalize their own home page by adding new Web parts and modifying existing Web parts.

 

In June CDC Software announced that Evangelical Christian Credit Union implemented the Pivotal CRM for Financial Services.

"Our success is dependent upon our ability to strengthen and retain relationships with our existing customers," says Alan Weisenberger, ECCU's vice president of technology services, adding that the Pivotal CRM "helps us understand important factors like share-of-wallet and network relationships."

 

ECCU is a banking resource for churches, Christian schools and other evangelical ministries throughout the U.S. Although ECCU primarily serves organizations rather than individuals, many of its individual members are also part of one or more of these organizations, and many of the organizations have ties to each other.

 

ECCU tasked the Pivotal CRM product with supporting the commercial orientation of the credit union and managing the complex member relationships "without significant customization," Weisenberger said: "The out-of-the-box functionality for commercial banking significantly reduced the need for customization."

 

The product has helped improve collaboration and communication in and among its front-line sales force, as well as a variety of sales support users, ECCU officials say, "making it easy for any user to go into the system and see the status of a transaction… [without] e-mailing an in-house support person and waiting for a response, which might not arrive until the next morning."