Front-office employees will have to make fewer clicks to reach customer information and customer-relationship management (CRM) tools with Onyx Software Corp.'s newest version of its Onyx Employee Portal.

Employee Portal, which is being rolled out next week, provides data access through a Web browser, much like Onyx's portals for customers and partners. But unlike those products, Employee Portal also features a host of customer relationship-management tools intended to help front-office personnel do their jobs. Employee Portal lets users manage account information, track sales opportunities, create customer-service queues, and analyze customer data for market segmentation--functions usually found in traditional client-server CRM packages.

The new version of the software makes it possible to customize the portal content and tools--including external content and links to back-office applications--to match the user. While all front-office employees are interested in customer information, they're not interested in the same information. A salesperson may want to see prospects in a sales pipeline and projections for his or her territory, while a call-center rep might want to see how long customers are waiting on the phone, and whether their issues are being resolved.

"Rather than giving our people a generic interface, we can customize those views to the way they work," says Doug Clawson, chief technical officer of NetUpdate Inc.

NetUpdate, a Bellevue, Wash., application service provider, is implementing Employee Portal for its employees. The Onyx application will tie in with NetUpdate's Web software, which lets customers check their accounts and buy new services. By integrating that system with the Employee Portal, NetUpdate can see what customers have done on the Web when they dial into a call center.

Other new features of the portal include customer-list management, product-record tracking, sales-literature ordering and fulfillment, integrated reporting, and workflow and alert capabilities. The portal is available immediately, starting at $30,000 for an Onyx Internet Server license, and $2,500 for each concurrent user.