The Official Salesforce Blog
The Official Salesforce Blog - May 2009
-
Vote for salesforce.com!
May 28, 2009The Software Satisfaction Awards take place annually and are unique as they are based on primary research amongst genuine buyers and end-users of business software applications.
Voters are asked to rate the business software products on four key attributes: ease of use; functionality; reliability; and value for money.
Voting begins on May 1 and will end on June 30 and can be found here: http://www.salesforce.com/uk/campaigns/software- satisfaction-awards.jsp
Salesforce.com has entered the following categories and would appreciate your votes!
Contact Centre Software - Salesforce CRM
Enterprise CRM software - Salesforce.CRM
SME CRM Software - Salesforce CRM
Web-Hosted CRM - Salesforce CRM -
Easy to Remember URLS
May 27, 2009As the community grows there are more and more sites to keep track of.
Rather than navigate to YouTube or Facebook and try to find our respective channel…
Just type in… http://salesforce.com/YouTube
Or... http://salesforce.com/Twitter
Or... http://salesforce.com/Facebook
Or… http://salesforce.com/LinkedIn
Or... http://salesforce.com/Flickr
Because the links are all in a consistent format, they are easy to remember, making it super quick to pull up the page you are looking for.
-
Coffee on the Cloud
May 26, 2009We're publishing more and more content to our YouTube Channel including these new interviews with Peter Coffee. We encourage you to login, rate the videos, and leave comments to tell us what you think.
Also on YouTube... product demos, keynote presentations, customer success stories
-
Additional Options added to Dreamforce '09 "Vote for the Band"
May 21, 2009On April 30th, we asked for your help to "Vote for the Band". Thanks for all your voting, comments and additional suggestions. We probably won't book "Rob Zombie, but we heard you when you asked for more choices.
So in that spirit, we went back to the table and added another eight options for the Dreamforce Global Gala (see below). Please help us now and vote. We can't guarantee that we'll be able to secure your top choices. As you might imagine, securing big name bands for corporate events is never easy. But we will do our best to secure an awesome band and throw a gala event that's fun for everyone.
-
Lasting Beyond Las Vegas
May 15, 2009I hope it's not universally true that "what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas" -- because we're going to be holding a number of discussions on the Cloud in general, and Platform as a Service in particular, at the coming week's Interop Conference.
It would be nice to think that the resulting inspirations will last long enough to do some good when people get back to the office.
I'll participate in two of the panel discussions scheduled early in the week, specifically:
- Monday at 1:40 pm in Mandalay D, "Where Can Things Go Wrong?"
- Tuesday at 2:45 pm in Breakers L: "PaaS, SaaS and More: A Taxonomy of On-Demand Applications"
I hope to see some of our Force.com developer community, and our Salesforce CRM customers and partners, at what looks to be a wide-ranging conference addressing many aspects of what we're all trying to get done. Please let me know if you'll be there.
-
Summer ‘09 Preview: Analytics gets a makeover and the Service Cloud helps you get personal with your partners.
May 15, 2009Salesforce.com customers knows what it means when the weather gets warmer, coats get lighter and vacations are planned – it means salesforce.com’s 29th generation release, Summer ’09, is just around the corner! Today, we are previewing new features across the Service Cloud, Sales Cloud and Force.com platform, but in June of 2009 our customers will be able to use all of these features themselves.
One of the things our customers love best about salesforce.com is our seasonal release strategy, delivering entirely new features and innovations three times a year – for no additional cost. In fact, salesforce.com, like a good bottle of wine, only gets better with age.
With more than 27,000 votes on the IdeaExchange, the visual charting feature is one of the most popular features we are introducing with Summer ‘09. New displays, colors and two entirely new chart types, funnel and donut, combine to help you make quick and more well informed business decisions.
-
Summer 09 Release Preview: Same Innovation, But Twice the Education
May 12, 2009Recently, I came across a moving post by Alex Sutherland, probably the most passionate advocate and user of the IdeaExchange, which describes what motivates him to play such an active role in the community. One points he makes is:"It also gives you a greater sense of ownership in the community, because you are contributing something that the group can objectively identify as valuable. "
Amen. We at salesforce.com are committed to holding up our end of the bargain too - by delivering features that our customers care about and vote for. But given the pace of innovation created by our community, and the number of features we're delivering each quarter, it can all be a bit much to digest.
That is why we're splitting the Summer 09 release preview webinar into two parts - Force.com Platform and Salesforce.com Apps. This way, you can choose to only attend one if you are not interested in the other, and we get deeper into the details on each.
Click here to sign up for this May 14th live event.
-
IdeaExchange Best Practice Tips: Posting Ideas
May 10, 2009We would like to share some best practice tips on posting Ideas on the IdeaExchange.
- First, log on to the IdeaExchange
- Familiarize yourself with existing Ideas
- Share your Ideas:
- Search before posting
- Define organizational needs
- Use a catchy & descriptive title
- Be clear & concise
- Throw in a pictureAlso, additional guidance from a fellow community user (thecrmninja): http://ideas.salesforce.com/article/show/10093522/IdeaExchange_Posting_Guidelines. We couldn't have said it better ourselves!
To learn how you can influence our product roadmap:
-
Exit, Defying the Bear
May 8, 2009It's been said that drama's most famous stage direction is Shakespeare's "Exit, pursued by a bear" in "The Winter's Tale." Today, "the bear" is of course the challenging situation for enterprises and entrepreneurs all over the world -- but an upward exit may soon be in sight.
I've been on a global bear-hunt, during the last three months, in meetings with IT innovators in India, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea, Spain and Italy as well as throughout
the U.S. I'll be sharing some of what I've learned next week in San Jose, when I keynote a World Financial Symposiums conference, "Growth and Exit Strategies for Software and IT Companies," on the afternoon of May 14.
Never before has it been a cheerful statement to say that "The Future is Cloudy" -- but that will be my message there. I look forward to the resulting conversations.
-
The Web Has Won, and Now Must Govern
May 8, 2009As any successful revolutionary can tell you, toppling a hated tyrant is easy compared to running the country thereafter. The focus has to shift from accenting differences to forging coalitions -- and so it is quickly becoming with Cloud Computing.
The upcoming Glue Conference, May 12 and 13 in Denver, will focus specifically on the opportunity and challenge of Web application integration. If you're in the area, perhaps you'll join me for my brief presentation, "Using Platforms as Service Glue" (Tuesday at 10:45) or a longer panel discussion, "Platforms and Clouds: Building Out Web Apps in the Sky" (Tuesday at 3:45 pm). I'll also be around during various breaks and evening events through mid-morning Wednesday: if we should be talking, please find me there.
If you can't come to Denver, I can still make my case for the cloud-based platform as the hub of modern service integration: there are links to several comments on this question, as well as my own white paper on the subject, in my blog post from early last year. I'd also like to share an interview from this past February that included this point: "The cloud enables click-to-connect construction of customer communities and partner ecosystems, putting cloud-computing adopters far ahead in the race to the future."
This isn't about doing what's cool and clever: this is about doing what's necessary, at a price and with a simplicity that actually makes it attractive to get started. If you have not started already, remember the immortal words of Pavel Chekov: "Scotty, now would be a good time!"
Bookmark