User Experience Blog - January 2009

• Salesforce and Internet Explorer 6, Part II

  Jerry Sherman Jan 31, 2009

  It's been a while since we've posted about browser usage, specifically regarding Internet Explorer 6.

  Well, IE 6 - and Internet Explorer in general - have been in the news a bit lately. First, Internet Explorer overall is losing browser market share. There are now several great alternative browsers available. Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Google Chrome are all excellent options that are being pursued by other customers and web users in general. In the last four years, IE's market share has dropped from over 90% to 68%, with the rate of decline accelerating each year due to the introduction of these excellent alternatives.

  Second, Google (with their Gmail application), Facebook, and a host of other Web applications have either dropped official support for, or did not release any new features supported in, IE6 in the last year. These recommendations reflect what we at salesforce.com are seeing as well: as a "last generation" browser that will be 8 years old in a few months, IE 6 has fallen far behind other browsers with regard to speed, stability, and security. Of the browsers we support, IE 6 provides the worst user experience for our users on all of these fronts.

  At this point, we want to urge all users who are still using IE 6 to consider one of the following changes (in ranked order):

  • Option 1: If you have the necessary permissions on your computer, install and use a browser other than Internet Explorer
    Salesforce officially supports Mozilla Firefox 3.0.x and Apple Safari 3.x.  And while not officially supported, Google Chrome 1.0 seems to work extremely well with our service. All of these browsers are much more standards compliant than Internet Explorer, all are much quicker, and new releases of these browsers - overall - have historically had minimal issues.

  
  

  • Option 2: If you have the necessary permissions, but you don't want to give up on IE, upgrade to Internet Explorer 7
    IE 7 is faster, more reliable, and better supported by Microsoft than IE 6.

  
  

  • Option 3: If you don't have any control over the programs installed on your computer, talk with your IT department about switching to a different browser
    We know we have a wide variety of customers - everything from 3-person companies in a garage to multi-national corporations - and understand that many of you have no choice in which browser you use at work. Start engaging the appropriate people in your company now to improve your user experience with Web-based applications.

  
  

  Please note that we still fully support IE 6 for the features we have today, and will continue to support it through 2009; we will give ample notice to all of our customers before we pursue officially de-supporting IE 6. However, as we release more functionality and features this year, you will begin to see new UI enhancements that will not be fully supported on IE 6.

  We want our users to have the fastest, most reliable experience possible every day, and transitioning from IE 6 to a faster and better supported browser - as soon as possible - is a great way to ensure that.

  Share and Enjoy.

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• Google Docs and the Collaborative Power of the Cloud

  Craig Villamor Jan 20, 2009

  More powerful than a PowerPoint. Able to unite multi-disciplinary teams in a single environment. It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's Google Presentations!

  At Salesforce we're obviously big fans of cloud computing so it should come as no surprise that we're also big fans of Google Docs, the online office productivity suite from Google. Introduced into our work environment late last year, Google Docs has rapidly supplanted Microsoft Office as the solution of choice for office documents. Since its arrival it has been unclogging inboxes and facilitating collaboration across the organization.

  To demonstrate the power of Google Docs, let's imagine a fairly typical office document scenario: You're working on a big presentation for the executives. There are multiple contributors and each person is assigned a portion of slides in a large slide deck. One "lucky" person is elected to merge all of the slides together. As the project progresses, managing the edits and the merge process soon consume a huge percentage of the team's time as they email multi-megabyte files back and forth.

  Recently, the Salesforce User Experience team was faced with the prospect of just such a scenario. We began a large collaborative design effort to create an extensive set of "paper" prototypes. When all was said and done over 200 slides were produced by 6 primary contributors (and at times we had up to 10 contributors). Using traditional software this multi-contributor document would have been a recipe for disaster but, thanks to Google Presentations, we had the power of cloud computing on our side. With a Google Presentation all contributors were able to edit a single document online at the same time. No merging of slides. No emailing multi-megabyte files back and forth. One central location to collaborate, contribute, share and capture feedback in real time. We were even able to allow multiple key stakeholders to view the document while it was being edited by multiple contributors, providing an unprecedented level of transparency and collaboration.

  Through the course of the project we put some extreme demands on Google Presentations and it performed well beyond our expectations. Thanks to Google Docs and cloud computing we were able to spend more time innovating and less time wrestling with technology and logistics. Hooray for the cloud!

  Do you have a success story you'd like to share? We'd love to hear it! How is your company leveraging the power of Salesforce in combination with other cloud services?

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