- Introduction & Background
SuperOffice Expander consists of a set of Developer Tools that makes it easy (and of course efficient) to expand and customize any SuperOffice installation to suit the needs of the individual company.
Software from SuperOffice are well known (and awarded!) for its unique usability. We have provided more than 9.000 companies throughout the world with a tool to improve company productivity and increased sales. This has been, and will always be – our main goal. Nevertheless we have over the last years also put extensive efforts into making SuperOffice a “CRM Platform”. The term “platform” indicates that you should be able to build something on top of the ready-to-use software that SuperOffice provides.
To be able to build – or to Expand – you need a set of tools. SuperOffice Expander consist of a set of Developer Tools that makes it easy (and of course efficient) to expand and customize any SuperOffice installation to suit the needs of the individual company.
SuperOffice Expander does also facilitate a market of “Solution Providers” – that is, independent software vendors (ISVs) that develop standard modules and applications that works seamlessly integrated with the SuperOffice standard products.
To illustrate the scalability of SuperOffice CRM, we can identify 3 stereotypes of customer solutions. SuperOffice CRM Standard, Enhanced and Customized. Stereotypes 2 & 3 require modern, robust, usable and cost effective development tools if they are to be long term profitable. SuperOffice Expander provides such tools.
We see this as a very important change in the SuperOffice product portfolio, as well as a general shift in IT trends and priorities.
We believe there are two main drivers behind the evolution of the CRM-market:
- CRM has become a strategic topic for most businesses today. It is a strategy, a vision with defined business processes and has over the last years acquired all the characteristics of a maturing profession. It’s being discussed in boardrooms and at top management level. Hence it is given a far stronger priority and attention than a few years back.
- CRM vendors are facing concrete demands regarding integration at all levels – application-, data- as well as process integration. This shift in customer attitude and priority requires considerable changes in CRM software architectures as well as the ability to accommodate new needs.
- Adopting the emerging technologies is a prerequisite to meet the new demands from professional customers. The competing technologies JAVA and .NET are both improving application development and system architectures. In addition the IT industry has agreed on an important standard that benefits both the customers and the software companies: WebServices and XML. These standards are widely seen as an important facilitator of robust and cost effective means for systems integration and communication across application platforms.
With SuperOffice Expander and our CRM NetServer built on .NET technology and a Service Oriented Architecture, SuperOffice is able to meet also these new requirements from today’s challenging CRM customers.