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.