Dovetail Software Blogs

SAP to Increase Maintenance Fees ''SAP announced today that it will increase maintenance fees for customers on its lower-cost support option, moving them to an enhanced support offering that will cost 22% of their net licensing fees by 2012. The change affects about 17,000 customers on SAP's Basic Support, offered at 17% of net licensing ...

Our goal is to provide the best software possible to our customers and even better customer support. To do that, you need the right people – those dedicated to serving the customer and committed to advancing their own knowledge, often on their own time. That is the culture we have created at Dovetail Software, and I am quite proud of all our ...

Dovetail Software Blogs: Agile Development: Dare to Fail “In many striking ways, agile development, with its short bursts of speculative iteration – saying in effect, does this work? – resembles nothing so much as an outright challenge to fail. Or to succeed, as the case may be. But either way to produce feedback quickly, so ...

Yesterday we alluded to better methods for IT to adopt, to fit its operations for the modern age. Methods arise from principles of operation, so what principles are of use in the age of uncertainty?Software development VP Larry Cone, writing in ITtoolbox, has been presenting valuable views on the development process in his articles on failure ...

Communication is the common medium through which all collaboration moves. We think we know how to communicate, but maybe we don’t, and maybe thinking we do is our greatest hindrance to success. Anthony Cimino posted a brilliant observation recently at CIO.com, showing how we can learn to communicate by looking inside any busy ...

It was a foregone conclusion that Dovetail Software would come to call itself an agile developer: you had only to know its nimble products to see that they must have come from a group of engineers who were open to getting it right, and who wanted to work towards this end, rather than coming from an entrenched position of how things ...

Dovetail Software Blogs: Email Needs To Collaborate “Email is outdated in an age progressing rapidly with technologies of collaboration. Knowledge is what matters now – and always did, else why communicate in the first place? The great value of Enterprise 2.0, deriving from the technologies and examples of Web 2.0, lies in ...

The future development path of CRM is undoubtedly tied to the business goal of constructing a customer-centric culture. The future of IT itself is challenging and exciting. Two commentators today feature in our links column, both lauding the pivotal value of IT in the success and even survival of the enterprise. Michael Kavis, an ...

CIOs have full agendas over the next few years, transforming their companies into agile, customer-centric organizations. But before IT can embrace its heady future, it will have to get over its past, and rise out of the rut grooved in by its history. As CIO Michael Hugos explains: “For the past 20 years or more, people in IT ...

The IT departments of some companies will shrink in the coming years, replaced by managed services, and chipped away at by small-scale, online subnets rapidly deployed through the firewall by individual users and teams. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Some IT departments will transform themselves into businesses, and grow larger ...