The AppExchange Blog
The AppExchange Blog - February 2008
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New AppExchange 101 for Marketing Kit now available
Feb 12, 2008Exciting news for marketers- we've teamed up with the Salesforce Marketing application group to develop a free success kit containing our best content, practices, and recommendations for navigating the marketing category on the AppExchange. You can register here to access the free whitepaper, customer webinar, and optional quarterly newsletter.
If you're not in marketing, don't worry. We'll be coming out with different success kits in the coming months.
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AppExchange at Dreamforce Europe, May 7-8
Feb 6, 2008Did you know that over one-third of Salesforce customers have global deployments and that we have AppExchange customers from over 75 countries? Not surprisingly, a large number of you are in Europe. As such, AppExchange is planning a large presence at our upcoming first-ever Dreamforce Europe event May 7-8 in London.
Here is a preview of some of our proposed sessions-
We decided to let the attendees decide on the conference sessions and agenda, so get your votes in soon. See you in London!
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Speaking at Web 2.0 Expo and Software Business SLAM Conference
Feb 5, 2008FYI, I will be speaking about B2B social networking at the upcoming Software Business SLAM (Sales, Licensing, Alliances, and Marketing) Conference April 3 and Web 2.0 Expo April 22-25, both in San Francisco. Hope to see you there.
Here are the session abstracts-
B2B Social Networking: Important Lessons for Software Marketing and Product Development
What does the rising prominence of online social networking mean for today's B2B software companies? How can software companies ensure their marketing and product development strategies fully consider these new technologies and user behavior? What lessons can learned from the successes of consumer networks such as Facebook and YouTube?
Join Clara Shih, Founder of Faceforce, the first enterprise mash-up on Facebook, and Product Line Director of AppExchange at Salesforce.com, to learn about the future of B2B social networking and strategies for building better customer relationships and communities using social data. You will hear about innovative ways software companies are transforming their customer, recruiting, reseller, and vendor relationships with online social networking technology.
Faceforce: Bringing the Power of the Social Graph to Enterprise Apps
Clara Shih (Salesforce / Faceforce)Faceforce, which integrates Salesforce CRM with Facebook, is the first social enterprise mash-up. Approximately once per decade, the enterprise software industry undergoes a fundamental shift ushered in by a new disruptive technology. The 70s gave rise to mainframe computing, led by companies like IBM. In the 80s, the introduction of PCs gave rise to client-server computing, dominated by Microsoft, Oracle, and others. During the 90s, the Internet shook things up once again, making possible new innovations led by companies like Google, Yahoo!, eBay, and Salesforce.com. Today, we are seeing a fourth wave of “socially aware” enterprise applications.
This session will walk through the thinking behind Faceforce, future development plans, and how the social networking phenomenon at large will fundamentally change how business software is developed, deployed, and used. We will explore how the lines are increasingly blurring between the consumer and enterprise spaces, and what this means to businesses trying to market and sell their products.
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Cool new features on the AppExchange for Spring 08
Feb 5, 2008Thanks to your great suggestions and feedback on the IdeaExchange, our product and development team has been busy the last few months designing and delivering new functionality on the AppExchange site. Here is some of the latest:
- ‘Share with a Colleague.’ We’ve added a new link on each app listing that lets you share the app with a friend or business associate with one click. This was an idea community member craskulinecz posted on the IdeaExchange.
- Category content. Many of you told us in focus groups and surveys that you wanted more content so you could benefit from professional development and also build better business cases for AppExchange apps. We’ve introduced new content on the category pages, including success stories from customers using apps in that category, analyst whitepapers, and recorded webinars.
- Category email alerts. Not only can you find relevant content on the category pages when you visit AppExchange, you can also sign up for email alerts (currently in pilot on the marketing category only, but we will roll out to the others soon) to receive quarterly newsletters showcasing new apps in the category, webinars, whitepapers, and best practices. And in case you’re worried, we observe the strictest privacy policies regarding your opt-in and promise not to spam you or share your information with third parties without your expressed consent.
- Improved search. We know that with over 750 applications on AppExchange and new ones being added every day that it can be challenging at times to find exactly what you want. That’s why we have invested in powerful new search technology to deliver better, more relevant results faster. The best part is this search functionality will keep improving over time as more people use it.
- Government-to-Government AppExchange. International government agencies are starting to use AppExchange now to find, share, and distribute applications. To help them more easily find what they are looking for, we developed a new government-to-government AppExchange showcasing these special apps.
- Your latest viewed apps. Our vision is to create a personalized experience for you each time you come back to the AppExchange. First, we introduced search and browse filters (for example so you could view only apps that are compatible with your Salesforce edition) as well as ‘My Saved Apps.’ Last week, we also unveiled the ‘Latest Viewed Apps’ widget on the home page that shows up to the last four app listings you viewed.
We are proud to announce these new features designed to improve your AppExchange experience – we are busy working now on the next set of enhancements which we will share with you in a few months. Please share your continued feedback and ideas with us on the IdeaExchange!
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AppExchange goes on tour to New York!
Feb 5, 2008Thank you to everyone who came out for the New York success tour event last week, especially those of you who participated in the AppExchange focus group! It was an incredible turnout with lively discussion, great networking, and a bustling partner expo hall.
Here are some of the top ideas and suggestions from the focus group-
- More analyst reviews (right now roughly 100 applications have analyst reviews… we will work on getting coverage for the rest)
- If a non-admin user attempts to ‘Get it Now,’ notify the Salesforce administrator so that he/she can help
- Email the admin to request a customer review 60 days after installing an app
- Provide personalized recommendations like Amazon.com
- App listings should offer both a test drive and demo
Look forward to seeing you next quarter!
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Kudos to EchoSign – Over 60 customers on AppExchange!
Feb 1, 2008We’d like to congratulate EchoSign, the latest AppExchange partner to exceed sixty joint customers on AppExchange with their On-Demand eSignatures and Contract Management application. Customers including Cartelligent, Intacct (also an AppExchange partner), and LinkedIn, use EchoSign for Salesforce to automatically sign, track, and file company contracts.
Along with this market success, EchoSign also recently closed $6 million of Series B financing in a round led by Emergence Capital. Kudos to the entire EchoSign team on reaching these dual milestones!
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