Sales.Oracle.Com
Sales.Oracle.Com as the name suggests is a Web-based SFA tool. As a consequence, all of your client data is stored and maintained by Oracle at its remote site.
The benefit of this arrangement is that no technical staff is required to maintain a local database server, and of course you do not need the additional hardware.
What you will need is a reliable Internet connection, and if you have quite a few sales staff, it may need to be a healthy bandwidth as well.
The latter is quite important if you do not want your staff throwing wobblies over significant delays; we certainly found the response times of our local packages to be much faster than Oracle, but then again it was quite fast for a Web-based app.
Registering with Oracle and setting up your account is certainly not difficult; if you can drive a Web browser you should be able to cope.
It's a simple matter of setting up your preferences: over a series of screens the user is prompted to configure items such as language, date format, and currency, for example.
In addition there are prefence settings for each of the tabs--for example, the Opportunity tab can be configured to sort by customer name or any of six other fields.
The interface is relatively Spartan, but it is still clear and simple to navigate.
The tabs at the top of the display launch a collection of task specific menus in the blue menu bar, which are all quite logical. Of course, one advantage of the application is that the staff, while on the road, will be presented with exactly the same interface as they would be in the office.
Importing existing client information into Oracle is simplified by the import wizard, but the data must be in CSV format only.
Customising the fields and look of the interface is not really an option, so Oracle has in most cases gone overboard ensuring that it has provided enough flexibility to suit a wide range of customers.
Contact details for each client includes almost 60 fields, and includes options such as notes, salutation, alternative contact details, and no fewer than eight fields dedicated to phone, pager, home, and other contact phone numbers.
At first glance calendar functions are typical with daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly displays. The availability display can be read at a glance with free time indicated with green blocks and booked time in red.
The interesting option is the custom calendar display, which can generate the report in Excel or HTML format, and can include multiple users and groups.
Of course being a Web-based application appointment reminders and the like are e-mailed to you at the designated time. The application can synch with any Palm OS device as well as Outlook 97 and 2000 via free software that is available for download at the Web site.
Apparently, you can also access your customer and calendar details with any WAP device although we did not test this option.
E-mail functionality is not integrated as snugly as the other desktop-based applications we tested, and the same goes for creating mail merges, letters and faxes. The user must effectively create the latter manually.
At first glance reporting does not appear very extensive either. Certainly Oracle lacks the pretty graphing capabilities of some of the other packages, but you can download the reports in CSV format and then graph them with Excel--of course this adds an extra step.
Creating a report from the forecast summary template, for example, is surprisingly flexible there are numerous user configurations for the filters, sort options, and display options that indicates this is a powerful reporting tool.
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