The Official Salesforce Blog
The Official Salesforce Blog - August 2009
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Should salesforce.com update its logo?
Aug 31, 2009We are considering a more contemporary logo and would like your feedback on the concept below. Leave a comment and let us know what you think.You can also check out the conversations taking place on our Facebook Page and the IdeaExchange.
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Get On Board The Winter '10 Train
Aug 26, 2009Winter '10 promises to bring some amazing new features to the Salesforce Cloud apps and Force.com platform. Join us in September for a back-to-back presentation of exciting new Winter '10 enhancements. The first presentation will highlight some of the upcoming innovation in Force.com. Immediately following will be the second presentation showcasing what's new in Salesforce CRM.
Visit the IdeaExchange to see a list of what's coming in Winter '10. Some of the top features you'll love are:
- Batch Apex
- Bulk API
- Quoting
- Packaging More Components
- Dynamic Campaign Viewing
- And Much More...
The show starts at 10:00 AM PDT on Tuesday, September 15th. Register now to attend one or both presentations.
(cross posted from the Force.com Blog)
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Core Arguments for the Cloud
Aug 25, 2009I've often noted that Moore's Law is still in effect, but that its jurisdiction has permanently shifted from the desktop and the laptop to the massive data centers of the cloud. What we'll see at this week's Hot Chips conference in Palo Alto is that the trend toward massively multi-core machines continues to gain momentum, and that developers must be prepared to acquire new skills if they're to make the most of new economies.
People in everyday life, it turns out, do quite badly at self-assessment when it comes to doing more than one thing at a time; developers will do well to be more rigorous, but that doesn't mean they have to do the low-level threading through that maze all alone. Cloud platforms like Force.com can elevate that potentially difficult task to a far higher level.
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Joining the Cloud Generation
Aug 25, 2009A current eWEEK slide show on the "Next-Gen IT Manager" reads like an action plan for adopting and exploiting the Service Cloud and the Force.com platform.
- Acquire and use external, as well as internal, resources
- Evaluate and familiarize with technologies 12-18 months ahead of the mainstream
- Integrate security into IT operations rather than treating it as a separate function
- Build and use real-time dashboards for proactive identification and amelioration of issues
- Consider compliance as an integral aspect of enterprise system development
- Be the Chief Innovation Officer -- but with focus on business needs, not mere novelties
- Understand social networks and their role in real-time customer engagement
- Be the Chief Mobility Officer, designing all new applications with anywhere-access in mind
- Reflect life-cycle environmental footprint in technology choices and operations
- Develop the next generation of IT leadership
Final take-away: the next generation is the one that comes to work tomorrow, not next year or next decade. Don't wait until current resources are replaced to look for these qualities: develop them, starting now, with the people you already have.
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CRM Admins: Recent Force.com Webinar and Demo Series #2!
Aug 24, 2009Administrators,
Get some new ideas on the types of apps you can build on Force.com. Check out this you tube video featuring a fellow customer from Alteva who showed his cool project management app he built using Force.com.
In addition, we will be hosting our SECOND demo series which focuses on building an application on Force.com. Our first demo on workflow, held earlier this month was well received by the community, with 85 community members attending!
We asked you what Force.com topics you were interested in learning more about…you answered Force.com Sites. We listened and will continue our series with a Salesforce expert demoing how to leverage Force.com Sites. Don’t miss this great opportunity to ask an expert your burning questions on Sites!
Here are the webinar details:
What: Community Demo Series #2 - Force.com Sites
When: September 3, 2009
Time: 11 am - 11:30 am PDT
Where: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/join/118350208
Participant Dial-In Number(s):
*US/Canada Dial-in #: ( 866 ) 551 - 3341 /Conference ID: 29039993 -
The High Cost of Being Cheap
Aug 18, 2009With a little bit of effort, you can come up with some really clever ways of cutting obvious but insignificant costs -- while ignoring much larger costs (or benefits) that never show up on an invoice.
That's what comes to my mind when I read various calls for "open clouds" -- the kind that make it easy, at least conceptually, to shift tasks and workloads from one cloud service provider to another. Many people get excited about the idea of dynamically (or even automatically) seeking the lowest cost per CPU second, or the lowest cost per unit of data storage. Yes, those are numbers that will show up on a list of terms and conditions, and you could even build an API that lets different service providers bid for the opportunity to be the lowest-price performer of those tasks.
What you won't see reflected on those price lists are the huge economic benefits that come from getting an application built more quickly, as recently measured by Nucleus Research, or delivering a higher-function application that substantially aids its users in doing more -- and in making better decisions about what to do.
Last week, Page 1 Solutions disclosed the results of its effort to develop a custom project management application. After three years of frustration in trying to create what they needed using an earlier generation of development tools and perspectives, the company worked with consultant Bluewolf Inc. to construct a comprehensive task management solution on Force.com -- in only four months.
If Page 1 Solutions had drunk the widely-purveyed Kool-Aid of "open clouds," and limited its options to cloud service providers hosting only the familiar models of traditional software stacks on virtualized servers, this outcome would have been far less likely.
When people say that they want all cloud platforms to accept, and exchange, some sort of uniform workload unit that can move from one to another, it seems to me that they're asking for a Kafkaesque nightmare of a highway: one where every vehicle is a Hummer SUT.
Yes, a fleet of those trucks can do just about anything that most people might want, but they don't do anything especially well -- and most of the time, they're not the most efficient choice.
What I want is an "open cloud" that functions like an actual highway, where I can drive quickly and safely from one point to another using the vehicle that suits my particular balance of needs for capacity and speed:
where I can combine the services of multiple providers, using fully disclosed APIs and industry standard protocols, in the same way that I might tow a trailer using a standard hitch -- or leave the trailer at home when it's not useful.
It seems to me that we already have an open cloud.
In one part of that cloud, I can store data with Amazon.com; in another part of that cloud, I can edit documents collaboratively with Google; in yet another part of that cloud, I can use packaged (but highly customizable) Salesforce CRM capabilities or create custom applications using Force.com.
The open cloud is already here: let's use it to deliver big benefits, not cripple it as the price of lowering commodity computational costs.
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App Tips, Best Practices & More: Sign up for the AppExchange Newsletter
Aug 17, 2009Want to keep up to date on the latest and greatest AppExchange listings but don't have the time?
Sign up for the monthly AppExchange newsletter and get instant access to a host of resources including:
- Best practice content from power admins
- Rankings of top fee-based and free apps
- Features on popular categories like Dashboards, Email Marketing & Project Management
- New reviews from the community
......and much more!
Subscribe today to see what all of the buzz is about:
https://www.salesforce.com/form/appexchange/news.jsp -
Best Practice series: Do more with less—oh sure, but how?
Aug 12, 2009In the current economic downturn, these words are sweeping the nation like a tsunami: “Do more with less.” The same 4 words repeated everywhere. The same 4 words interpreted in dozens of different ways.
I suspect management likes the phrase because it’s strategically vague. Workers dread it for the same reason. Just what does it mean? Worst case, a company lays off lots of people and tells the rest to do more with less. That means you get to do the job of 2 or 3 people, maybe for less money. Best case, a company redefines priorities and focuses its people and resources on fewer—but strategically vital—projects. In that case, “do more with less” becomes “do more on less.”
For small businesses, both phrases are more than overused workplace refrains—they’re the reality they live by, in good times and bad. Small businesses know they must focus on those areas where (to use another overused phrase) they get the biggest bang for the buck. And in those areas, they must make the most of all their assets, including their employees, their customers, and their technologies.
In this Best Practice document, customer success manager Jessica Cumin identifies the areas in which investments yield the greatest business benefits. And for each area, she identifies the tools that are available for free, or at a low cost.
Check out Jessica’s paper—it cuts through the noise to help you find affordable, yet very valuable tools. Then contribute your own ideas, resources, and advice. Do your part to put some meaning into “do more with less.”
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Improve Your Salesforce, Three Minutes at a Time
Aug 6, 2009We've just launched a series of helpful videos to give you quick customization wins. Drawn from our Friday session of the Daily Best Practice Webinar series, the videos are all short and easy tips to implement that have been very well-received. Now, you can watch some of the more popular tips anytime in high definition, right on Youtube.
Be sure you subscribe to our YouTube Channel to get alerts when new tips and other videos are added.
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Clouds' Lightning Strikes Capitols' Domes?
Aug 5, 2009You can almost feel the electric charge surrounding public-sector debates about cloud adoption. No one wants to be seen as being careless with taxpayers' private information, but neither does anyone want to be seen as wasting public funds on outmoded models of how to do the people's business.
In the state of Washington, the choice between a new data center and a cloud adoption strategy has one state legislator saying that "Software as a service is unequivocally the future"; that the current state of IT, with thick clients on too many state employees' desks, "is simply not the long-term model."
In Los Angeles, a planned adoption of Google's GMail has a single public document engaging in a monologue worthy of Hamlet, with to-be-or-not-to-be passages including: "If the City switches to Google, it will shift control over its e-mail and office systems to Google, although Google's service levels often exceed the current City service level"; "There are provisions in the contract intended to ensure the confidentiality and security of City documents and the system as a whole...[that] meet or exceed the City's needs, but additional evaluation must occur throughout the implementation period."The Los Angeles analysis concludes that the savings are likely to be substantial, both actual reductions of spending and shifts of spending to higher-value tasks. The breakdown of "hard" and "soft" savings is so detailed that it defies summarization, but the overall incentives to make the change appear to add up to millions of dollars over the planned contract period of five years -- including significant one-time costs of transition.
Meanwhile, a Google executive is not being shy on the subject of security, quoted as saying (perhaps too forthrightly) that "From what I know of the city's operation, this is a security upgrade"; that the strength of cloud security and privacy controls was actually a major differentiator in deciding the course to be taken.
I've had some comments of my own about security in the cloud, which I've shared in a video (at left) and in a white paper that may offer some useful data for your own discussions on this key concern.
Of course, salesforce.com is also one of the tallest lightning rods in this still-strengthening storm.
Key government functions such as U.S. Army recruiting aren't merely migrating to the cloud, but are adding new sophistication to their process at the same time that they accelerate application deployment.It's not about just moving existing applications and functions into the cloud: it's about re-thinking what can be done when the cloud, rather than the confines of the on-premise data center, is the IT environment of first resort.
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