This book provides a fundamental understanding of the competencies and tactics that increase customer retention and referrals. Ideal for both employees who serve customers directly or indirectly and those who manage them, this book offers lessons that will build professional competencies in the business of service.

Service Broker is a key Microsoft product in support of message–based processing between applications. Pro SQL Server 2008 Service Broker helps you to take full advantage of this key Microsoft technology, beginning from the fundamentals, moving through installation and application development, and ultimately showing you how to develop highly available and scalable applications based upon the service–oriented architecture that is quickly gaining ground as the way forward in application development. Comprehensive approach to developing with Service Broker Strong focus on best practices and real–world scenarios Covers the key aspects of distributed application design

This comprehensive new resource presents applications of MEF’s (Metro Ethernet Forum) Carrier Ethernet architecture and provides insight into building end-to-end systems with third network services like MPLS-TP, VPLS, and PBT. This book includes new use cases and explores the new MEF/CEN specifications, services, and applications. While providing a look into lifecycle service orchestration (LSO), virtualization, and cloud series, this book highlights the pros and cons of these technologies for service providers and enterprise network owners. Pseudowires architectures, control planes, mutisegment architecture, and multisegment pseudowire setup mechanisms are explained. Ethernet protection is explored, including Automatic Protection Switching (APS) entities, linear protection, ring protection, and link aggregations. This book covers Carrier Ethernet Traffic Management, Carrier Ethernet Operation Administration Management and Performance (OAMP), Circuit Emulation Services (CES), and Carrier Ethernet Local Management Interface (E-LIM). Full chapters on Provider Bridges (PB), Provider Backbone Bridges (PBB), Provider Backbone Transport (PBT), and information modeling are also included in this invaluable resource.

In companies that produce goods and services, productivity and efficiency improvements are a constant challenge. This book reviews the differences between productivity and efficiency. It proposes a new method and makes available a computational tool for implementation that contributes to facilitating the use of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The book presents a discussion about productivity and efficiency, illustrating the potentials of use and conceptual differences. It covers the concepts and techniques for analysis of productivity and efficiency, analyzing critical benefits and limitations, explains in detail how to use DEA for analysis, provides innovative methods for using DEA, offers a free online computer tool with a direction guide, shows real empirical applications, and covers other techniques that can be used to complement the analysis performed. The book is for professionals, managers, consultants, students working and taking courses in productive systems of goods and services. Ancillary materials include a free online computer tool to operationalize the concepts and methods proposed in the book, a guide on how to use the method and the software developed for the DEA application. Solutions manual, instructor’s manual, PowerPoint slides, and figure slides also will be available upon qualified adoption.

Presenting a systematic article-by-article commentary on the European Service Regulation (recast), and written by renowned experts from several EU Member States, this book gives guidance for the proper understanding and practical operation of cross-border judicial cooperation in civil and commercial matters within the EU.

Full text of Digital Copyright Act with legislative history, associated case law and other materials relevant to the subject.