There's been a lot of discussion this week about the analytics mash-ups (mashboards) that Winter '07 will make possible. ZDnet, Computer World, WhatPC, Silicon.com, Computing, and many other publications have written about the announcement. There has also been some good discussion on the Ideas website about this new feature. I think what's most exciting is the opportunity for Saleforce customers to access and interact with best-of-breed CRM and non-CRM analytics in a single view.

This week we also announced a new analytics category on the AppExchange. Right now each of the solutions is focused on sales, marketing, and/or service and support analytics. This will evolve with Winter '07 as partners, customers, and Salesforce employees build new applications and components that will complement and extend what we deliver directly with our own reports and dashboards. At Dreamforce we hope to have many of our analytics partners demonstrating what they can deliver within our dashboard framework. In fact, we're even hoping to have a "mashboard shootout" where we'll invite partners to show off what they can do with Winter '07 Salesforce dashboards. It should be fun! If you're one of our analytics partners or thinking of becoming one we'd love to see you there. If you're using another tool to analyze Salesforce data and think it would be a good fit to work directly within our dashboards, let us know.