The Official Salesforce Blog
The Official Salesforce Blog - September 2009
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Force.com learning opportunities for CRM administrators
Sep 30, 2009Hello CRM Administrators,
We have some great upcoming learning opportunities regarding Force.com to share with you.
1. On Oct 8, we will be featuring our latest Admin Hero - Melissa Elliott from Schumacher Group.
See how they build unique Force.com com apps to manage relationships with physicians and administer contracts and proposals. Join us for another example of how to use your existing skills to build applications that extend beyond CRM. Learn how Schumacher Group harnessed the power of salesforce.com to do the following:
- Get better reports with summary fields
- Put an end to bad data with workflows, approvals, and validation rules
- Create a fresh new look with Force.com pages functionality
2. Want to get free hands-on training with Force.com? Join us for a free Force.com training session and learn how you can build apps that go beyond CRM—using skills you already have. We will be hosting this session in Boston (Oct 12), Toronto (Oct 14) and Dallas (Oct 16). Sessions are limited to 30 students.
3. We will be hosting our THIRD demo series which focuses on building an application on Force.com. Our first two demos on workflow and sites 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 "Building an app on Force.com". We listened and will continue our series with a Salesforce expert demoing how to build applications for your business. Don’t miss this great opportunity to ask an expert your burning questions on Force.com!When: October 15, 11 am - 11:30 am PST
Dial In: 877-206-4432/Conference ID: 33962546
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A Great Read Before Attending Dreamforce This Year
Sep 29, 2009
If you are planning on coming to Dreamforce this year you might get an advanced copy of Behind the Cloud which comes out October 19th. There is lots of great background on the company and insight into the strategies which have led to its phenomenal growth. It’d be a fun thing to discuss with other customers at the networking events and you might also have a chance to meet different people from the book.The other day Marc recorded a couple short videos where he explains what inspired him to write this book, why entrepreneurs should read it, and why it’s particularly interesting in times like these. -
What the Cloud Entails
Sep 23, 2009You can't put the cloud in a box, let alone a pigeonhole. People who ought to know better continue to pretend that cloud applications aren't ready for full-spectrum enterprise workloads, but enterprise developers do know better—and they're writing the apps today.
You can see the distribution, or at least get an idea of its outlines, in the results of a study (PDF) just released by CustomerSat, a unit of MarketTools Inc., from a sample of more than 1,100 companies using Force.com. In striking agreement with previous, totally separate studies by Nucleus Research and Galorath Inc., CustomerSat concluded that "on average, it’s 5.1 times faster to develop custom applications with Force.com compared to traditional on-premise development platforms."
To some extent, that's old news; what's new, at least to me, in the CustomerSat results is the information now available on the breadth of applications being built. To quote the CustomerSat report,
The most popular applications were for reporting and analytics, project management, and contract management applications. Next, respondents reported building more transaction-heavy applications, including quote and order management, billing, and commission/compensation management applications. Finally, long tail applications ranging from compliance solutions to legal management applications followed.
That phrase, "long tail," is probably known to most readers of this blog: we're nearing the fifth anniversary, somewhat to my surprise, of Chris Anderson's coinage of this label in Wired. The basic idea is that most of the potential value in a market may well be in items with tiny individual market share, representing the far extreme range of a frequency distribution. The problem in a physical marketplace is that artificial scarcities, like shelf space in bookstores, encourage vendors to stock only the items with the largest individual sales.
Enterprise application software has always been a "long tail" market, because return on investment was high enough to compel costly custom development as the price of being a competitive company. We've traditionally wound up with a marketplace in which a handful of monstrously complex products were individually modified, site by site, to meet their customers' needs.
Multi-tenant kernels and metadata-based customization, as found in Force.com, make it possible to serve the long tail with economy of scale. That's a whole new game. Let's play.
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Adding Up to Agreement
Sep 22, 2009Yesterday, I called attention to a poll being done by The Motley Fool on the magnitude of the cloud computing opportunity. Votes have been piling up since then, and the numbers are more than a little interesting.
Right up top, a nice majority of respondents unreservedly agree that cloud computing is "the biggest market opportunity right now" – but some of the other possible responses also belong in the same column of cloud computing endorsements.
For example, some voters agree that the cloud is the major opportunity, but think that cloud providers' share price levels are too high. The market will decide, but clearly nothing else looks better right now. Others feel that the cloud is not the last word – but then again, does it need to be?
When you sort the votes into just two buckets, "pro" and "con", only 18% of voters consider the cloud either over-hyped or under-secured. I'll argue cloud security any day. As for hype, I remember lots of things that have had that accusation thrown at them – and thrown it right back. (“Well informed people know it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and that were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value” – The Boston Post, 1865)
The real question, it seems to me, is this: of all the faults that one might ascribe to the cloud, is there any single item on that list that won't be substantially addressed within the next three years? Of all the faults that burden older models of IT, is there any single item on that list that won't still be with us?
Are there any other questions?
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Only a Service "Just Works"
Sep 22, 2009I've been a Macintosh user (sometimes exclusively so) for 25 years, so I'm allowed to use Mac TV ads as examples of a pernicious fantasy: the myth that any machine "just works".
Apple's TV ads get a lot of mileage from the notion that Macs "just work", while other popular thick-client platforms putatively plague their users with "a ton of headaches". In real life, there's almost never such a thing as a machine that you buy, and own, and use, and never need to debug or maintain.
My own favorite counterexample to the Mac "just works" myth is the Spotlight search utility in the OS X operating system. To be 100% completely fair, Spotlight's just great when it works. When it doesn't, though, there's a tedious and counter-intuitive process for rebuilding the search index structures: you add your target storage location to a Privacy list in Spotlight Preferences to make Spotlight forget whatever it thinks it knows about the contents, then remove that item from the list to let Spotlight get to know the contents all over again.
Sometimes, it takes a system restart to make the Privacy list pay attention; when the process works, it's up to you to figure out when it's done. Imagine telling your parent (or your boss) over the phone, "Open the Activity Monitor, pull down the options list at top right and click it to view all processes, then wait for mds and mdimport to stop taking turns doing CPR on the file system." Sounds like a headache to me.
Could things be better? Sure. In a robust operating system, you can always add one more level of monitoring. If I start a Spotlight search, and nothing happens in the next fifteen seconds, I could conceivably get a pop-up box that says "Spotlight seems to be running slowly. Repair Spotlight?" People make fun of the Clippy tool in Microsoft Office that tries to figure out what you're doing, and offers help when it thinks it knows your objective, but the principle is sound even if some implementations have been farcical.
Alternatively, the "Repair" item in the pop-up menu for Windows network connections doesn't get in your face without an invitation. Although you have to know enough to ask for its help (which many people prefer), it still dramatically lowers the level of knowledge and the number of user-initiated steps required to fix a problem. But all of these are just different degrees of wasting end-user time with single-user maintenance of single-user machines.
I've never needed to rebuild an index structure on eBay. I've never needed to repair a corrupted file on Google Docs. No salesforce.com user has ever needed to check for version clashes before doing a complex, possibly data-destroying upgrade of one or more pieces of a brittle software stack.
As far as the user of any competently provided service is concerned, the service "just works" – or on the rare occasions when it doesn't, it's the provider's job to figure out the problem and communicate a realistic timeline for when things will get back to normal.
We can watch, and even enjoy, the mud-wrestling between partisans of one thick-client option or another, but none of them can actually live up to the promise of "it just works." More problems? Fewer problems? That's not the point.
Making IT hiccups else's problem? That's a promise that actually can be kept, and that's what the cloud is all about.
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Almost a Majority
Sep 21, 2009I don't know how much longer they'll be taking new votes and comments, but the financionados at The Motley Fool are getting some interesting answers to their poll on the significance of cloud computing. Perhaps you should cast your vote right now.
Nearly half of the respondents so far, on the first day of polling, have said that cloud computing is indeed today's biggest market opportunity; that "We're just beginning to see its potential." Based on the blind-men-and-elephants commentaries that I still see in most popular treatments of the subject, I have to agree that even people whose job is technology tracking are generally failing to appreciate the variety and depth of cloud offerings.Fool blogger Tim Beyers gets it right in a key way, though, when he says that "I've become much less of a Mac user, and much more of a Google user... My MacBook Pro is merely the host for what amounts to a Google-Firefox operating system..." That sounds like the same experience that I see taking over on laptops and desktops everywhere.Beyers also quotes U.S. Federal CIO Vivek Kundra, who's currently in the spotlight thanks to last week's unveiling of government cloud computing portal Apps.gov -- whose offerings include, to no one's surprise, the salesforce.com portfolio of cloud applications and platform facilities that are already in use by agencies including the U.S. Army and the Department of State.Kundra is clearly ready to pursue the benefits of the cloud, calling it "the next generation of IT" and saying that it's "an innovation that not only can change how IT operates, but also save taxpayer dollars in the process." So, why should the taxpayers have all the fun? Vote now for the cloud. -
Winter '10 Platform Release Preview is live!
Sep 16, 2009The Force.com platform will have a nice set of brand new features in a few weeks (checktrust.salesforce.com for the schedule). In the mean time, you can start planning for these features, and experimenting with them. Our release page points to the release preview notes, the release schedule, a bunch of the great new features, and to the preview release signup - where you can get a new org ready with all the new features, today.
Here are some of our favorites:
- Bulk Loader - a new bulk API for inserting/upserting large numbers of records
- Batch Apex - for asynchronous execution
- Code Scheduler - think cron for Apex
- Remote Access Applications with OAuth - yep, OAuth!
Have fun figuring our your favourites, and enjoy experimenting with them until Winter '10 goes GA!
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Announcing Service Listings on the AppExchange
Sep 14, 2009This week we are thrilled to unveil the new Service Listing capability on the AppExchange, allowing our community of systems integrators and business consultants to market their services to salesforce.com customers via the AppExchange. This is a huge win for our service partners who can now leverage the same technology and features that have driven tremendous success for our ISV community since 2006. And importantly, our customers and the larger community now have a complete marketplace where they can find and employ all partners for cloud computing solutions. This will revolutionize the way our customers connect their existing systems to our Sales Cloud and Service Cloud plus build entirely new custom cloud apps using Force.com.
The reaction from the press and analyst community has been great:
"With cloud computing still evolving, now is a good time for salesforce.com to keep expanding its role. Not only does the company look to lead end users skyward, but it is now endeavoring to encourage partners to come to grips with cloud apps. Salesforce.com is also become more of a matchmaker between the two communities through the additions it will make to the AppExchange."
China Martens, 451 Group
"[Salesforce.com] said it plans to add service listings to the company's AppExchange, an online marketplace where developers and companies buy and sell application for the salesforce platform. Not only does it provide the VARs with a forum for finding new apps to offer their customers but it also gives developers an opportunity to interact with them - possible building relationships that could generate custom apps or extra business down the road."
Sam Diaz, ZDNet
In addition to browsing application listings from our community of world-class Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), now you can find information from all of our service partners including:
- Systems integrators
- Business consulting partners
- Training providers
- Custom application development partners
These listings leverage many of the existing AppExchange features you have come to know and love, like search and categorization, screenshots and videos, and everyone's favorite....customer reviews! Watch this 5 minute demo to see how you can take full advantage of these listings today.
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Service Cloud 2 - The Next Chapter in the Customer Service Revolution
Sep 9, 2009Today, salesforce.com hosted an event in San Francisco to unveil Service Cloud 2, announcing incredible market momentum and some new game changing innovations for the Service Cloud. Originally announced in January of this year, the Service Cloud is the next generation solution for customer service - it exponentially increases the quality of service and lowers costs by leveraging community expertise.
More than 8,000 customers, including Extra Space Storage, NJ TRANSIT, and Plantronics are already using the Service Cloud to improve their customer service initiatives. Here's a video of Kraig Swensrud, vice president of product marketing, that gives an overview of today's news.
The technology innovations rolled out today include:
- Salesforce Knowledge, the world's first knowledge base designed for cloud computing. Here's a demo of Salesforce Knowledge.
- Salesforce Answers, an entirely new way to look at customer communities and discussion forums
- Salesforce for Twitter, which allows companies to monitor and join the customer service conversations taking place on Twitter. Here's a demo of Salesforce for Twitter.
To learn more, or get started with the Service Cloud, please visit http://www.salesforce.com/servicecloud2/ .
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It's About Time
Sep 8, 2009A superior technology improves the solution of a nearly universal problem. "The market drivers are product quality, comfort and aesthetics, say manufacturers," as reported by an industry observer -- and the product in question is one that most people replace every two or three years, at most.
And so, the result? "The technology appeared eight to ten years ago and now we have penetration...of almost 100% which is a relatively short period," says an industry executive. Technology adoption takes time...
...even when you're talking about something as easy to change as the shape of your windshield wiper blades.
You'll pardon me, then, I hope, if I feel that the adoption of cloud computing is coming along quite nicely. Most of the elements of a true platform as a service have not even been available to developers for as long as three years yet -- but already, there are more than 80 million lines of multi-tenant custom code and more than 300 thousand user interface customizations, shaping the capability of Force.com into whatever business process someone wanted to support.
Ready to wipe the floor with your competition? Come to the cloud.
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