This release looks great, meatier than the last one!

See some of the ideas coming in this next release:
http://ideas.salesforce.com/popular/coming_in_winter_10

I still cannot find the formal release notes, nor an estimated date.... when is winter in San Francisco anyways?

I'm thinking we'll see these features launched in line with Dreamforce this year. Whilst on the topic of Dreamforce, if you work in the salesforce.com realm, hit up your boss or use your travel budget to attend this function, it really is truly revolutionary, I've been the last few years.

You'll come back with ideas on how to dramatically change the way your business operates, and you will become part of the small-ish percentage of people who are leading the charge in transforming organisations using the internet, and implementing Web 2.0 business strategies ahead of the pack...

Interesting Article. Copy pasted below...

When a company uses a consulting firm to build an application, it is beneficial to have the firm take responsibility for the entire project. If you don't do this, it will be impossible to assign blame when things fall apart.

The other aspect of this is that the team needs to work closely together, else miscommunication and other mayhem ensue.

So this forces the consulting firm to staff up with ALL the various competencies that are needed to complete a project - and for the organization to use this one-stop shop.

But when you use a platform like Force.com, this becomes less important. The architecture of the application is already in place, all the hard things like security and authentication are taken care of, there is no database tuning needed, there is much closer communication with the users, etc. The development cycles are much shorter and the overall number of people involved is significanly less, so the need for project management and system documentation doesn't have the same level of criticality.

This means that it is relatively easy to slot different people in at different times from different companies - because they are all working in the same playground they know well. It's not a problem to carve out a snippet of APEX code to be developed by someone who is not heavily involved in the project, or for someone to build a VisualForce screen. It just plugs right in (or should).

Besides, because many of the applications that will be built on a platform like Force will be ever-evolving, it will be much harder to keep a complete team in place at all times. (This is beyond "maintenance" - there is no such thing as maintenance for situational applications - just ever-evolving software).

This means that we are going to see the rise of boutique firms that specialize in different aspects of Force development - application/business process design, APEX/VF programming, and cloud node integration. The old one-stop shop will become increasingly less necessary for building many types of applications, and companies will simply be able to call in specialists as needed from whatever firm has the resources available at the time.

Or not?

Salesforce.com Sites is now out.

Got into salesforce.com, click setup, develop, then sites. Register your force.com domain!

I've registered http://hallman.force.com/.

This is a fundamental shift in what salesforce.com can do as a platform.

Really really exciting stuff.

Force.com is now becoming not only a CRM, but now a true database and application development platform.

Watch out Websphere and the likes.

To put this in perspective, people normally take in the region of 10 to 20 days of consulting and development for a simple integration from a website with salesforce.com, now using Sites, we could do it in 2-10 days.

Great for our team of developers, since we're much better at coding in Sites (Visualforce and Apex) than messing around with troublesome middleware and custom integration servers!

Simpler and cheaper, could you want for more?

Great to see some Aussie companies getting on board with Salesforce.com Sites.

See news article.

This organisation was lucky enough to get on the pre-release schedule for Sites.

Our company was lucky enough to work with a number of the Australian pre-release clients to build out their Sites pages...

Now that Sites is available, I can start rolling it out on my website.

Summer 09 release went live over the weekend.

That's great, we have a whole lot more neat features.

I was hoping that Salesforce.com Sites was going to be included in this release, even though the release notes didn't mention it.

The official Sites page says that it will be available Calendar 09... lets hope it's coming in the next release?

If anyone else knows when to expect it let me know.

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.

Salesforce.com's mobile product is quite powerful, but also quite pricey.

It's designed more for complicated Field Service, Field Sales, or Mobile Order Entry processes for example.

For this purpose it's good value for money.

But for those of us who just wanted to have our salesforce.com contacts on our blackberry or iphone, then this was too possibly too expensive (unless you have Unlimited edition like us, where it's thrown in for free).

But now, rejoyce, for Mobile Lite has just been released, and it's free!
Check it out at:
http://www.salesforce.com/mobile/lite/

As per my previous blog post on the 3 major trends in software, Mobility, Social Networks, and Cloud Delivery, we can now say that salesforce.com has hit 3 for 3, lets see how the adoption of Mobile Lite changes the way we use our salesforce.com or force.com applications.

Found this link on the web.

Havent evaluated it yet myself. It's a connector between MYOB and salesforce.com.

Would be interesting if it worked well.

See:
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/Salesforcecom-announces-New-Eclipsebased-Forcecom-IDE-376539/

For those of you who arent aware.

There is a complete programming langauge inside salesforce.com called Apex, and a complete user interface design language, called Visualforce.

You can program in any software, you can program straight into the salesforce.com web browser or into notepad if you want, but the benefits of using Eclipse are pretty strong.

Namely code checking, syntax highlighting simplified migration between orgs.

If you are a programmer, or interested in starting to code, check it out.

I just received an invitation to do an online survey, from Wendy Close at salesforce.com.

I accepted, and the survey was about market research into the need for an On Demand Financial Package that is part of salesforce.com.

I am excited about this. As long as it is done correctly...

Apparently as part of the Salesforce.com 'Service Cloud', we can now expect to see integration with twitter.

http://venturebeat.com/2009/03/22/salesforcecom-lets-you-answer-customer-complaints-on-twitter/

I think the service cloud is innovative, but innovative in a Moore way.

Will this concept cross the chasm? Personally, I feel that this technology is a bit too bleeding edge, and in it's current form will not become a dominant business solution.
In concept though it is great, and I'm looking forward to this being refined so that it does become the killer 'Service Cloud' we all need.

See:
http://www.crn.com/software/215900816

Makes you realise that salesforce.com having gone down in total mabye 3 hours in the past 2 years is not too bad.

Salesforce.com 10 months after announcing plans to build a data centre in Singapore are now ready to go live.

According to information I have obtained just this morning, I am lead to believe that certain user 'orgs' have been asked to become among the first to be migrated across to the new data centre platform.

If you view trust.salesforce.com, you will see incredibly fast page delivery speeds, but importantly, these speeds are 'delivery' speeds, and do not account necessarily for the actual speed it may take for you to get a salesforce.com page open on your computer.

Will this new data centre mean faster speeds for salesforce.com users in Australia? With less hops to us? I am not expert on telecommunications infrastructure between Sydney and Singapore, but I wonder which ISP's in Australia will have the fastest connections to the Singapore data centre?

Will this mean that salesforce.com users on the Singapore data centre will not be subject to the Patriot Laws that are in affect in the USA?

Salesforce.com has had their 'Trust' website for a long time now.
trust.salesforce.com is a central place to see the performance of the salesforce.com servers, inlcuding down time, maintenance, or page delivery times for example.


It seems google have now just recently mimmicked this service.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery?

Just goes to show that Google and other Cloud Computing vendors are only now, implementing things that salesforce.com has had for years.

I would still like to see Google acquire salesforce.com, not this year... but maybe next?

I am really very excited about the imminent full release of Force.com Sites.

For those of you unaware of what it is, it allows one click publishing of salesforce.com pages directly to a website.

Integrating with your CRM with your website has long been a challenge, and now I'm really excited to see that this is a real achievable goal, without the need to invest in costly custom server side development or middle-ware platforms.

Salesforce.com asked their community to build some sample Sites, to demonstrate the power of the system, before this goes Generally Available, here are 3 sites that have been built solely in Force.com Sites:

- Gaming E-Commerce Site

- Force.com Sites Wiki

- Force.com Sites E-Commerce Shop

What are some sample applications you can use for sites?

- List your upcoming Events (Campaigns) on your website and enable smarter registration.
- Online E-Commerce and Purchasing via a credit card gateway?
- Manage your forms (e.g. Contact Me, Trial Downloads, Whitepapers) dynamically without the need to re-program web-to-lead forms.

Literally, any time you need Dynamic Content on your website, where the content is (or could be) in salesforce.com, you can now do this!

See BT's new business website and the press release from Astadia.

Salesforce.com have a strong vision to move from being solely a direct sales organisation, to a more channel focussed company.

In short, BT are now reselling salesforce.com, along with an implementation package bundled in from Astadia (a US Salesforce.com consulting partner).

I wonder if or when we will see Telstra or Optus partnering with salesforce.com in Australia.