SWK Technologies is holding the first MAPADOC Connections Customer Conference for its EDI customers next month. The event will be in Chicago on October 17 and 18. SWK has 375 active MAPADOC customers. "The conference will be focused on supply chain management," notes Brian Dunn, director of marketing for the Livingston, N.J.-based Sage VAR.

KeyedIn Solutions has moved into the Baltic countries through a partner agreement with Estonian Company, McLean & Laneman. That firm will project KeyedIn products and services in Estonia, Finland and the Baltic region. (That's what the press release says. That must mean the other Baltic countries since in my view, Estonia is a Baltic country).

Act has received its first update following its sale by Sage to SwiftPage with the release of Act v. 16. The biggest change, however, is to the release schedule. Instead of having a single annual upgrade, the product will now have multiple updates that can be streamed and installed in the background rather than having the user reinstall the core platform. Business Care subscribers get immediate access to each update. Act Premium users also get access to an expanded range of functions via smartphones and tablets. Other enhancements include automatic consolidation of contact details and global activity scheduling and automatic calculations using data from other standard or custom fields There is also a new history view of completed actions. Global activity rescheduling, proactive system alerts and streamlined field and layout configuration have been added.

Managed services provider Kaseya has hired a COO and an EVP of product management. Both new executives, COO Mark Combs and EVP Don LeClair, are graduates of CA Technologies. Combs had 35 years at CA, which in its previous life was Computer Associates. He had senior VP positions during his time there. In his most recent experience, he was part of the CA Technologies Mainframe Customer Solutions Unit. Anyone with CA during that long stretch has been through the good, the bad and the very, very ugly and back again. LeClair was SVP of Technology Strategy and SVP of Engineering and Distinguished Engineer. The new hires follow the employment of three others last month, CMO Loren Weinberg Jarrett, CSO Brian Murphy and CTO Prakash Khot. If I were covering the general technology market, I would definitely be asking about Combs and LeClair, "Why leave?" and "Why now?" since they had such a long tenure. But I am not and I won't.