Onyx Enhances Employee Portal

Onyx Software Corp., like many of its customer-relationship-management competitors, recently unveiled a new version of its Employee Portal, a Web-based user interface that gives employees access to its CRM applications, collaboration tools, and other third-party back-office apps.

Competitors like Siebel Systems Inc. and Pivotal Corp. have also recently released new versions of their Employee Portals, stressing what they believe is an expanding area of CRM software: giving employees access to their own information such as benefits, commission, payroll, and vacation information as well as product and sales information. PeopleSoft Inc. and other vendors that are pushing integrated enterprise resource planning and CRM suites claim their software has offered this information via human resources back-office applications and their CRM applications. PeopleSoft also provides a Web-based portal for employees to access the information with the latest version of its CRM suite.

The new Onyx Employee Portal is based on the XML standard and lets marketing, sales, service, and support users access productivity tools, Web collaboration, product configuration, knowledge bases, expense reporting, and other back-office functions. Enhanced personalization tools let administrators set access rights to allow certain employees create one-to-one marketing campaigns, manage accounts, and share data with other relevant personnel. Through the use of the portal interface, users do not have to toggle between applications to access various Onyx and integrated third-party applications.