This is a neat video.


If you hear people talking about Cloud Computing, and never really fully understood what it is, this is a great start.

Some leading vendors in cloud computing for Businesses:

* Google - Not only search, new Enterprise Apps, in the Cloud (Enterprise Email, Calendars etc)
* Salesforce.com - CRM, Sales, Marketing and Customer Support Cloud Systems
* Amazon.com - EC2 and S3 Cloud Services for businesses
* Eloqua - Web Marketing Automation in the Cloud
* Boomi - Systems Integration in the Cloud

They are just some that spring to mind.

Tried to access the appexchange and got this message.

It begs the question, if sites is powering your public website, and the public websites of others, will maintenance always bring the entire website down?

When Sites goes GA (generally available), will thousands of websites and business systems go down for 4 hours every quarter during the release update window?

Can salesforce.com deliver an update without bringing down the system I wonder?

The new release of salesforce.com, Summer 09, seems to be scheduled to roll out between 4am and 10am on Sunday the 14th of June, Sydney time, mark your calendars.


Despite being the start of winter for us here in Australia, Summer 09 looks set to be a nice solid release.

From my readings it appears that there are a lot of Force.com / Platform updates, nothing really earth shattering, but simply making things work as they should. For example:

- Picklist Values for State & Country
- Can now customize Campaign Member, Partner Roles and Contact Role tables
- Better lookup filters
- Better support and auditing for Visualforce code
- Better mobile support, for iPhone and Blackberry Storm for example
- Can now merge Partner & Contact records who have portal accounts (I've been waiting for this!)

There are also some nice enhancements to the reporting engine, and one of my favourites, a nice Graphical Editor for Approval Workflow.

See the list of new features at:
http://ideas.salesforce.com/popular/coming_in_summer_09

If anyone spots the full release notes coming out, let me know, that should reach us soon I beleive.

Even in this difficult economic climate, software as a service seems to growing, this can be indicated by salesforce.com's success and in turn Benioff's pay structure.