Industry Experience
Higher Education
Music
Internet
Information Technology & Services
Summary
I am the Community Manager for Ombud, a new business technology research platform based in Boulder, CO. We are rethinking the way that the traditional enterprise technology research and purchasing processes have been handled and are building a social, community-based approach that will allow the entire enterprise ecosystem to be more transparent.
In this role my first priority is communicating with our users and acting as the main customer support contact for Ombud. This also includes contributing to content creation, marketing outreach, general industry research, product testing and UX, and more. I am constantly striving to make Ombud a simple, valuable and useful resource, so please don't hesitate to reach out with your thoughts or feedback- I'm here to help!
I spend most of the rest of my waking moments playing guitar and writing music with the Boulder-based jazz and funk group, Springdale Quartet, for whom I also do all website and social media work. We have played extensively throughout Colorado for the past few years and released our first full length album in May of 2011, with plans for a second in late 2012 - I'm a geek by day and a rocker by night!
Finally, I contribute to The Marquee Magazine, an independent music magazine with an estimated 27,000+ per month readership. Check out MarqueeMag.com for more info!
Specialties
Customer Support, Community, Written and Verbal Communication, Content Creation, Analytic Writing, Music, Social Media
I am the Community Manager for Ombud, a new business technology research platform based in Boulder, CO. We are rethinking the way that the traditional enterprise technology research and purchasing processes have been handled and are building a social, community-based approach that will allow the entire enterprise ecosystem to be more transparent.
In this role my first priority is communicating with our users and acting as the main customer support contact for Ombud. This also includes contributing to content creation, marketing outreach, general industry research, product testing and UX, and more. I am constantly striving to make Ombud a simple, valuable and useful resource, so please don't hesitate to reach out with your thoughts or feedback- I'm here to help!
I spend most of the rest of my waking moments playing guitar and writing music with the Boulder-based jazz and funk group, Springdale Quartet, for whom I also do all website and social media work. We have played extensively throughout Colorado for the past few years and released our first full length album in May of 2011, with plans for a second in late 2012 - I'm a geek by day and a rocker by night!
Finally, I contribute to The Marquee Magazine, an independent music magazine with an estimated 27,000+ per month readership. Check out MarqueeMag.com for more info!
Specialties
Customer Support, Community, Written and Verbal Communication, Content Creation, Analytic Writing, Music, Social Media
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Rate Ben WaligoskeRecent Reviews written by Ben Waligoske
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Pardot
Ben Waligoske's review of Pardot
After evaluating a handful of the major players in this space, I came away pretty impressed with Pardot’s approach, team, and product. They claim to be in the same league of functionality as the other huge players – Eloqua and Marketo – and while I can’t necessarily judge that based on my experience, Pardot’s solution is probably more straightforward and has a shorter learning curve than some of their competition (based on product demos of all 3). Their customer service has also been exemplary, as I’ve had some continued email communication with a particular team member around certain questions that the demo itself didn’t answer. Also, although I cannot confirm 100%, I do believe that Pardot’s solution comes in at a slightly lower cost than some of their major competitors... this is important to consider so long as you know the extent of functionality your business needs/will use.
Reviewed: About 12 months ago -
UserVoice Full Service
Ben Waligoske's review of UserVoice Feedback
I find UserVoice to be a great product for it’s Knowledge Base, managing feedback and idea tracking. We use it placed into our product in an iFrame as well, so it’s nice to have it all in one place for our users to access.
Reviewed: About 2 years ago
Feature-wise, the dashboard is well laid out and has all the necessary stuff- ticketing system, Knowledge Base publishing, and analytics so you can see how much users are actually gaining from your articles.
I think overall the most impressive part of UserVoice is that the company puts its money where their mouth is- the customer support is actually very, very good, and they do an excellent job of keeping their customers updated with the latest features, news, and even have a nice blog featuring customer service topics.
Overall, I would recommend UserVoice to most anyone and would use it again at a different company if that opportunity ever came up. -
DocuSign
Very slick, saves time and trouble!
My first experience with DocuSign was relatively recently when I used it to finalize the lease on my new apartment. The property company uses DocuSign exclusively for all their signatures, and I was very satisfied with the ease of use and general awesomeness of the service. Very point-and-shoot, uber-convenient, and best of all – GREEN!
Great product.
Reviewed: About 11 months ago -
HubSpot
Ben Waligoske's review of HubSpot
HubSpot was included on my short list of solutions to evaluate in the Marketing Automation space, and all things considered, I think they have a very good product that suits the needs of a lot of different types and sizes of companies. More than anything, I was impressed with some of their analytics and tracking capabilities, which could really be useful if your business is serious about data and lead generation/nuturing. I have only seen demos and spoken with the product team, and as of this writing have not actually played with the product, but if you’re in the market I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend HubSpot to be in a small group of offerings for serious consideration.
Reviewed: About 12 months ago -
Marketo
Marketo Review
Marketo seems to me, from a functionality standpoint, to be in the upper echelon of Marketing Automation and RPM solutions. I am speaking without hands on knowledge (ie- I have not actually used even the trial version of the software, yet..) but I have been evaluating Marketo along with many of their competitors via product briefings, extensive online research, and word-of-mouth. They, along with Eloqua, seem to have little competition for the pure range of capabilitites their product offers. I cannot speak to ease of use, although generally with more features comes a higher learning curve. But, the support and marketing team members I have spoken with have been well-informed, quick to respond, and were able to relatively easily show me around the many facets of the platform, so I came away impressed. Certainly should be on your short list if you are evaluating solutions in this space.
Reviewed: About 12 months ago -
Silverpop Engage
Ben Waligoske's review of Silverpop Engage
I should preface this review with a disclaimer, in that I have not actually used Silverpop- I have only evaluated it from a distance. However, after sitting through a product demo and speaking with members of the Silverpop team, I can say that the platform seems well put together and is a good all-in-one, self-service tool so long as you know the ins and outs of the software. The customer service team seems to have a knowledgeable background and was helpful with my questions, and the company touts their integrations as a major strong point, meaning their API works well with many CRM and Analytics tools with relatively little configuration necessary. If I get the chance to dive into the system and play with the product, I will certainly update with my findings.
Reviewed: About 12 months ago -
Eloqua10
Eloqua10 From a Distance
Eloqua10 is in the group of solutions that I have been reviewing with regard to Marketing Automation, and I really like what I’ve seen. Granted, I have not yet had a hands-on experience, but after seeing a product demo, many videos, and going through white papers, Eloqua certainly seems to have a rock-solid grip on their vision and execution. The platform is very complete from a functionality standpoint – including a strong RPM module, if this is important to your business – and I came away from my brief evaluation impressed. I cannot speak to pricing or ease of use, but the team members I spoke with were skilled and answered all of my questions.
Reviewed: About 12 months ago -
Atlassian Confluence
Ben's Review of Confluence
Confluence is a solid product that we use for our internal wiki. For the most part, it is easy to navigate and the features and functions are everything most companies would need in a wiki.
We basically use the version control to keep track of important company documents, and it also serves as a nice way to track certain methods of outreach, communications, etc. in a place that only employees have access too.
The only other similar product I really have experience with is Google Docs, and I think Confluence is a much more well-rounded product (although, it isn’t free!).
Reviewed: About 2 years ago -
HootSuite Social Media Dashboard
Ben Waligoske's review of HootSuite Social Media Dashboard
In my brief experience with HootSuite (the free version) I found it to be a serviceable tool for maintaining and monitoring various social media accounts. It has typical dashboard functionality and you can customize the streams you see to a certain extent. It’s publishing features are also adequate. All in all, it depends on how you want to use it, but for a free product this is a nice option to monitor your social media streams in real-time. Much easier than attempting to monitor using several browser tabs, etc.
Reviewed: About 2 years ago -
Google Docs
Ben Waligoske's review of Google Docs
Google Docs is a solid, freemium document collaboration tool. Good for anything that is not of high-security (although you can password protect your docs) and/or quick edits amongst team members. However, it does not replace or even approach some of the more robust document collaboration tools out there- but hey, it’s a Google product and it’s free, so what are you complaining about?
Reviewed: About 2 years ago -
Parature Feedback
Ben Waligoske's review of Parature Feedback
Ben Waligoske’s review of Parature Feedback
Reviewed: About 2 years ago -
Facebook Product Pages
Ben Waligoske's Review for: Facebook Product Pages
For brands, businesses, bands, etc. the Facebook Product pages represent a step up in presentation. Their greatest feature is their ability to be customized using 3rd party apps, and while you do lose some normal FB functionalities (for some reason, the search bar is unavailable unless you are logged in as an admin on a personal account), overal they are a better option for marketing, etc.
Reviewed: About 2 years ago
Experience
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Rank: 1 of 2 Score: 100%
37signals Backpack
Backpack is a web-based personal information manager and intranet for small business. The application has two main functions: user-created pages (whi...
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Rank: 1 of 3 Score: 100%
ArgyleSocial Social Media Marketing
Argyle's Software as a Service (SaaS) social media marketing solution enables marketers to more effectively manage and measure marketing campaigns on...
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Rank: 2 of 5 Score: 28%
Atlassian Confluence
Confluence is web-based enterprise wiki software written in Java and mainly used in corporate environments.
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Not Ranked
Atlassian JIRA
JIRA is a project tracking tool for teams building great software. JIRA sits at the center of your development team, connecting the team and the w...
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Rank: 3 of 3 Score: 0%
Attensity Analyze
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Rank: 1 of 2 Score: 100%
Awareness Social Marketing Hub
Awareness helps companies build and operate branded Web 2.0 communities. These online communities let customers, prospects, employees and partners c...
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Rank: 1 of 3 Score: 100%
BPMonline CRM
The solution is an innovative tool for managing processes and customer relationships. BPMonline CRM improves business performance by enabling its use...
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Rank: 2 of 4 Score: 51%
Basecamp
Basecamp is 37signals' first product, a web-based project management tool launched in 2004. The Ruby on Rails framework was extracted from the Baseca...
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Rank: 1 of 2 Score: 100%
BatchBlue Batchbook
Batchbook solves a crucial need by providing small businesses and entrepreneurs with web-based CRM software to manage and track the contact informati...
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Rank: 1 of 1 Score: 100%
Blogtronix Enterprise
Organizations deploy the Blogtronix social networking suite to empower their people with the information that is most meaningful to them.
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Rank: 1 of 1 Score: 100%
Caringo CAStor
CAStor is vendor neutral software that virtualizes hardware and networking resources to create a limitless pool of unified storage with high performa...
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Rank: 1 of 2 Score: 100%
CisionPoint Media Monitoring
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Rank: 1 of 1 Score: 100%
Conenza Community Core
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Rank: 4 of 4 Score: 14%
CritSend
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Rank: 1 of 1 Score: 100%
CrowdFlower Product Categorization
Quickly match products, URLs, Images, or other items to the appropriate categories within your site's taxonomy.
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Rank: 1 of 1 Score: 100%
CrowdFlower Search Relevance
Rate the relevance of search results on your site to train your search algorithm, assess underperforming queries, and ensure a searchable website.
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Rank: 2 of 4 Score: 13%
DataCore SANsymphony-V Storage Virtualization
SANsymphony-V software solves many of the difficult storage-related challenges raised by server and desktop virtualization in contemporary data cente...
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Rank: 1 of 1 Score: 100%
Demand Media Pluck Social Media Platform
Offering the industry's first social application server, Pluck platform provides integrated social media solutions that drive traffic, turn visitors ...
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Rank: 1 of 1 Score: 100%
EMC Documentum Standard Platform
Documentum is an enterprise content management platform, now delivered by EMC Corporation, as well as the name of the software company that originall...
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Rank: 2 of 4 Score: 55%
Facebook Product Pages
Companies use Facebook to interact with their customers by building a product page. Customers can "like", comment, provide feedback, ask questions, ...
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Rank: 1 of 2 Score: 100%
FalconStor Network Storage Server (NSS)
The FalconStor Network Storage Server (NSS) is a scalable, highly available solution that enables storage virtualization and business continuity in h...
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Rank: 1 of 3 Score: 100%
Genesys Social Engagement
The Genesys Social Media Solution is designed to help organizations create the integrated approach they need to turn the social media opportunity int...
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Rank: 1 of 2 Score: 100%
Gist
Gist pulls together all your contacts from your various inboxes, address books, social networks, and other sources then adding news, status updates, ...
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Rank: 5 of 6 Score: 6%
Google Docs
Create and share your work online and access your documents from anywhere.
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Rank: 2 of 3 Score: 39%
HubSpot
HubSpot consolidated the inbound marketing methods into one integrated software package, so the user can blog, tweet, optimize, capture leads and nur...
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Rank: 1 of 3 Score: 100%
Igloo Software Platform
Igloo develops social business solutions for your employees, your partners and your customers - securely stored and delivered in the cloud.
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Rank: 1 of 1 Score: 100%
Ignite Realtime Spark
Spark is an Open Source, cross-platform IM client optimized for businesses and organizations. It features built-in support for group chat, telephony ...
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Rank: 1 of 1 Score: 100%
Influitive
Influitive is a lead management tool that allows users to connect their brand advocates and prospects at every phase of the buying process, not just ...
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Rank: 1 of 2 Score: 100%
Jabber
Be more productive from anywhere on any device with Cisco Jabber, a new unified communications application. Cisco Jabber lets you access presence, in...
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Rank: 1 of 1 Score: 100%
Justuno Social Commerce Widget
Increase Facebook Fans/Likes, Google +1 & Tweets with an embeddable social commerce widget.
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Rank: 1 of 1 Score: 100%
Landslide CRM
Landslide CRM delivers results. You get a powerful, full-featured CRM system that's packed with easy to use tools that help you get the job done. Wit...
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Rank: 1 of 2 Score: 100%
Lithium Social Customer Suite
The Lithium Social Customer Suite is a set of social apps that allow you to listen, engage, and act on customers' conversations. The features list...
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Rank: 1 of 1 Score: 100%
LivePlan
LivePlan is a business planning software offering that helps professionals receive advice, manage financial projections, and collaborate with partner...
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Rank: 1 of 2 Score: 100%
LiveWorld Community Center 5.0 API
The 52nd technology build of our enterprise-class social network and community platform, Community Center 5.0 API provides a level of customization t...
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Rank: 2 of 3 Score: 31%
LoopFuse
LoopFuse offers a B2B marketing automation platform that tells you who is visiting your website, helps you capture their information, sends lead nurt...
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Rank: 2 of 4 Score: 36%
Marketo
Marketo combines tools needed to manage demand generation campaigns and generate quality sales leads – including email marketing, lead nurturing and ...
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Rank: 1 of 2 Score: 100%
Medallia Customer Experience Management Suite
Medallia purpose-built its Customer Feedback Management Solution to help clients capture feedback from their stakeholders, share the data company-wid...
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Rank: 1 of 2 Score: 100%
Microsoft Dynamics CRM
Microsoft Dynamics CRM offers large companies four products to improve their customer experience and marketing capacity.
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Rank: 1 of 2 Score: 100%
Neudesic Pulse
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Rank: 2 of 3 Score: 74%
Nimble
Nimble is a Web Based SaaS platform that helps small businesses attract and retain customers by enabling their team to work more effectively together...
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Rank: 2 of 2 Score: 100%
Nimbula Director
Nimbula Director, Nimbula’s flagship product, is scalable, automated, easy to use and provides complete control over your cloud. It provides a cost-e...
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Rank: 2 of 3 Score: 72%
OzmosisESP
Bringing the power of social content management and collaboration to healthcare. With OzmosisESP, healthcare organizations can unlock the knowledge a...
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Rank: 2 of 3 Score: 90%
Parature Contact
Tracking activity at the account level is key to growing your business relationships. Parature Contact works as a central repository for your accoun...
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Rank: 1 of 3 Score: 100%
Parature Feedback
Parature Feedback provides a fully integrated means for you to easily and efficiently obtain valuable customer feedback from multiple support channel...
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Rank: 2 of 3 Score: 42%
Parature Survey
Parature Survey lets you easily measure customer satisfaction and keep tabs on quality assurance anytime, while maintaining a quality customer experi...
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Rank: 1 of 2 Score: 100%
PeekAnalytics Social Audience Measurement
In Social Audience Measurement, PeekAnalytics delivers enterprise-class social audience measurement solutions that provide customer insights to marke...
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Rank: 2 of 2 Score: 100%
PiCloud Platform
The PiCloud Platform is a pay-as-you-go cloud computing platform that is easy to use, elastic and free of data lock-in. With PiCloud's serverless arc...
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Rank: 1 of 2 Score: 100%
Prophix Performance Management
An integrated performance management application that empowers organizations with budgeting, planning, forecasting, reporting, consolidations, and pe...
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Rank: 2 of 2 Score: 20%
Really Simple Systems CRM
You can access Really Simple Systems CRM and your data from anywhere where you have Internet connectivity: from your office, your home, your laptop, ...
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Rank: 2 of 3 Score: 41%
RightNow CX Cloud Platform
Built to be specifically focused on delivering exceptional customer experiences across all channels of interaction. We purposely built our Cloud-b...
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Rank: 2 of 3 Score: 30%
RightNow Contact Center Experience
RightNow Contact Center Experience enables end-to-end management of the customer experience by unifying customer data, contextual knowledge and inter...
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Rank: 1 of 3 Score: 100%
RightNow Social Experience
RightNow Social Experience enables brands to harness consumer influence and passion in service of the brand. From social media monitoring to branded...
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Rank: 1 of 2 Score: 100%
RightNow Web Experience
RightNow Web Experience gives customers access to your organization from their desktop or smartphone. Web Experience allows your customers to serve...
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Rank: 3 of 3 Score: 11%
SAP CRM
The SAP Customer Relationship Management application, part of the SAP Business Suite, not only helps you address your short-term imperatives – to red...
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Rank: 1 of 2 Score: 100%
SAP StreamWork
SAP StreamWork is available as a standalone solution, but features are now available in SAP Jam, a combination of SuccessFactors Jam and SAP StreamWo...
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Rank: 3 of 7 Score: 2%
Salesforce Chatter
Chatter, released in June 2010, is a real-time collaboration platform for users. The service sends information proactively via a real-time news strea...
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Rank: 1 of 1 Score: 100%
Salesforce Data.com
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Rank: 5 of 7 Score: 27%
SendGrid Email Management
SendGrid's cloud-based email infrastructure relieves businesses of the cost and complexity of maintaining custom email systems. SendGrid provides rel...
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Rank: 2 of 4 Score: 26%
Silverpop Engage
Silverpop Engage is an email marketing and marketing automation solution designed to streamline workflows for today's digital marketer. It has lead ...
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Rank: 2 of 3 Score: 64%
Socialcast
Socialcast is an enterprise collaboration platform that unites a company's people, data and applications in real-time.
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Rank: 1 of 2 Score: 100%
Spaces by Moxie
Our Spaces by Moxie™ Applications provides social enterprise software for employee and customer engagement. We enable companies to effectively com...
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Rank: 1 of 2 Score: 100%
SpigitEngage
SpigitEngage is an enterprise platform built for internal innovation communities. SpigitEngage activates your crowd by integrating emergent social c...
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Rank: 1 of 2 Score: 100%
Sugar Ultimate
Sugar Ultimate is the ultimate CRM suite for the most demanding customers, combining industry-leading features with the most modern CRM platform arch...
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Rank: 1 of 1 Score: 100%
Symantec VirtualStore
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Rank: 1 of 2 Score: 100%
Tintri VMstore T540
Tintri VMstore is the first storage solution designed exclusively for virtual machines (VMs). Traditional shared storage solutions require complex co...
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Rank: 1 of 2 Score: 100%
Toolbox.com
The Toolbox.com network of online communities enables anyone to access the collective knowledge of a worldwide audience of experienced professionals....
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Rank: 1 of 3 Score: 100%
Trello
Trello is a collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. In one glance, Trello tells you what's being worked on, who's working on wha...
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Rank: 1 of 2 Score: 100%
TwitSprout Social Media Analytics
TwitSprout Social Media Analytics helps you track social media activity for any Twitter account & Facebook Page. See how your performance stacks up ...
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Rank: 1 of 5 Score: 100%
UserVoice Full Service
UserVoice Full Service™ combines the power of UserVoice Feedback’s feedback forums with the simplicity of UserVoice Helpdesk’s case tracking tools in...
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Rank: 1 of 2 Score: 100%
Virsto for vSphere
In the current enterprise IT environment, most organizations are allocating 20 to 30 GB of storage capacity per virtual machine, which is the rule of...
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Rank: 1 of 2 Score: 100%
Webtrends Social
Webtrends Social is a unified social media management platform. Our tools and expertise enable marketers to execute, manage and improve their social ...
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Not Ranked
WordPress
WordPress is a free and open source blogging tool and a dynamic content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL. It has many features includin...
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Rank: 1 of 1 Score: 100%
Wufoo
Wufoo is an Internet application that helps anybody build online forms and surveys. When you design a form with Wufoo, it automatically builds the d...
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Rank: 4 of 13 Score: 50%
Yammer
Yammer is brings together all of a company’s employees inside a private and secure enterprise social network. Although Yammer is as easy to use as co...
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Rank: 2 of 3 Score: 76%
Zoho CRM
Zoho CRM offers you a complete customer relationship life-cycle management sofrware for managing Sales, Marketing, Customer Support, and Inventory ac...
Companies
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Ombud is a social research platform that offers descriptions, reviews, recommendations, ratings, and other resources on companies, products, events, ...
Started: About 2 years ago Ended: About 10 months agoCommunity Manager -
Started: About 3 years agoWriter -
The University of Colorado at Boulder is a Tier 1 research institution that received more than $280 million in sponsored research awards for the 2008...
Started: About 7 years ago Ended: About 4 years agoAlumni
Products
- Ben Waligoske Uses:
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Confluence is web-based enterprise wiki software written in Java and mainly used in corporate environments.
Started: About 2 years ago END USER -
WordPress is a free and open source blogging tool and a dynamic content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL. It has many features includin...
Started: About 5 years ago END USER -
JIRA is a project tracking tool for teams building great software.
JIRA sits at the center of your development team, connecting the team and the w...
END USER -
UserVoice Full Service™ combines the power of UserVoice Feedback’s feedback forums with the simplicity of UserVoice Helpdesk’s case tracking tools in...
END USER