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Dreamforce 2008: Force.com for Facebook

November 4, 2008 By Manoj Jasra Leave a Comment

Salesforce.com [NYSE: CRM] and Facebook today introduced a new suite of tools to marry next-generation business productivity applications to the interpersonal power of social networks. The new offering – Force.com for Facebook – is designed to foster a global development community for Facebook’s 120 million users and salesforce.com’s 100,000 developers. The move makes Facebook an ‘enterprise-friendly’ platform for global enterprises and individual entrepreneurs worldwide and puts salesforce.com at the forefront of business applications for social computing.

Force.com for Facebook enables developers to easily use the Facebook APIs within their Force.com applications. Freely available at http://developer.force.com, Force.com for Facebook provides a new set of tools and services to enable developers to build applications that bring together social data from Facebook with the database, logic and workflow and Sites capabilities in Force.com and run them on salesforce.com’s trusted global service infrastructure. The tools will give developers a new means of creating business applications that greatly expand Facebook users’ ability to do corporate work on the site, by managing sales data, organizing business events or automating marketing decisions

Developers Can Now Bring Together Facebook and Force.com Platforms

With Force.com for Facebook, developers have new tools to bring together the Facebook and Force.com platforms to build new kinds of social and business applications. Force.com provides a complete feature set for the development and delivery of business applications. By leveraging the social graph data on Facebook Platform, developers will have unprecedented capability to create applications that take advantage of the best of both platforms. As with applications built on Facebook Platform, users’ data remains secure and can only be accessed by developers with users’ permission.

Developers can use Force.com for Facebook to:

Enable a new class of applications for business on Facebook Platform. Force.com for Facebook enables the creation of applications that run 100 percent as a service, powered by Force.com. Applications built and run on Force.com inherit all the benefits of a proven platform, including security and sharing models, workflow, analytics, customization, integration, and mobile access as well as the reliability, availability and global scale of salesforce.com’s trusted infrastructure.
Leverage Facebook Connect to enrich new and existing Force.com applications with social data from Facebook APIs. The Facebook social graph layers on top of the Force.com platform. With Force.com for Facebook, social data is now readily available to the more than 100,000 developers in the salesforce.com ecosystem. Now they can leverage Facebook’s social graph to build a new class of enterprise applications.
Create new ways for Facebook users to share and connect. By making it easy for Force.com developers to build robust applications in areas like recruiting, productivity and project collaboration that can be quickly integrated through Facebook Platform, users on Facebook will be presented with new tools for activities such as sharing a job opportunity or collaborating with co-workers or friends on an event or project.

Apps-O-Rama (http://www.appsorama.com) is a developer of an online tool called Get Stuff Done for Facebook that helps individuals and groups collaborate on projects on Facebook. Apps-O-Rama built Get Stuff Done because they were frustrated by how hard it was to juggle all the activities going in their lives, especially when other people were involved. Since projects are inherently social, Facebook was a natural environment for a next generation project management tool. Now the world can Get Stuff Done collaboratively within their Facebook network and reliably with Force.com. Get Stuff Done can be used for anything users want to get done together, including sharing files, creating and assigning “to-do” lists, managing projects and seeing what happened while they were offline. It lets users go beyond group formation, and allows them to do things together such as plan trips, organize events, move to a new apartment and much more.

Filed Under: dreamforce, Facebook, salesforce

Dreamforce 2008: Informatica Announces On Demand Data Synchronization Service

November 4, 2008 By Manoj Jasra Leave a Comment

Informatica Corporation (NASDAQ: INFA), today announced Informatica On Demand Data Synchronization Service for salesforce.com, the newest addition to its family of On Demand Data Integration Services. The new service automates the steps required to ensure that on-premise data is kept consistent and current with data in Salesforce CRM and the Force.com platform. Now, business users can easily synchronize all their Salesforce CRM information, including customer, product, opportunity and sales data.

“Informatica continues to move the integration market into the cloud with the release of their Data Synchronization Service for salesforce.com,” stated Andrew Leigh, Director Platform Marketing, salesforce.com. “Data integration remains a critical success factor for not only our large enterprise accounts but also for our mid-market customers and our community of Force.com developers. With this release, Informatica offers a comprehensive family of on demand services to meet customer needs.”

Fast And Easy On Demand Synchronization

Informatica On Demand Data Synchronization Service provides Salesforce CRM administrators with a simple self-service capability to expedite time to value from their CRM implementation while reducing their reliance on IT.

Key capabilities of the new Service include:

Powerful mapping framework for designing multi-object transformations
Intuitive web-based wizard with over 100 built-in functions for building transformation rules
Flexible job orchestration for managing complex transformation rules involving multiple Salesforce CRM Orgs, files and databases.
Simple web-based management console for monitoring all data synchronization jobs
Support for Salesforce CRM and Force.com

“After comparing several solutions for integrating Salesforce CRM data with the rest of our IT systems, it became very evident that Informatica On Demand Data Synchronization Service was clearly the best solution for our needs,” said Yvonne Tang, Business Systems Manager at New York Media. “We were pleasantly surprised to find that Informatica On Demand offered everything we needed in a single, affordable Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) package. Not only were we able to develop all our integration tasks and deploy them into production in a matter of days, but their services were by far the easiest to use and had the most modern and intuitive user interface.”

Data Synchronization for Salesforce CRM administrators

With no software, hardware or cumbersome appliance to install or maintain, Informatica On Demand Data Synchronization Service is a Software-as-a-Service offering that provides a compelling and familiar value proposition to business users. It helps Salesforce CRM administrators improve their operational efficiency by automating and expediting the deployment of common data integration tasks.

Availability

Informatica On Demand Data Synchronization Service for salesforce.com is available today and is priced starting at $1,000/month. For further product information, please visit www.informaticaondemand.com

Filed Under: dreamforce, salesforce

Dreamforce 2008: BigMachines Announces New Sales Document Application

November 4, 2008 By Manoj Jasra Leave a Comment

BigMachines, Inc. announced that it is developing a new native application on the Force.com platform from salesforce.com. The announcement was made today at Dreamforce ’08, salesforce.com’s User and Developer Conference. The new application will enable sales teams and channels to easily generate professional sales documents from within a Salesforce CRM opportunity.

Using the new BigMachines application, sales reps will be able to add products and quotes to opportunities and manage pricing and discounts. System administrators will be able to build templates for sales documents, such as proposals, quotes and contracts, using BigMachines Document Engine, and publish the templates to sales reps, who select their selling documents from within their familiar Salesforce CRM interface. The new application will be available for purchase on the Force.com AppExchange online marketplace.

The Force.com platform simplifies the development of on-demand applications and allows them to be easily shared, exchanged and installed with a few simple clicks via the AppExchange. By building the new application directly on the Force.com platform, BigMachines gains all the benefits of the proven security, reliability and scalability of salesforce.com’s trusted global infrastructure and ensures that the application will be automatically integrated with Salesforce CRM applications.

“Many successful customers have used the Force.com AppExchange to add Big Machines to their Salesforce CRM implementations to help manage daily sales operations,” said Clarence So, Chief Marketing Officer, salesforce.com. “With their new application on Force.com, Big Machines is showcasing their leadership in technology innovation and continued focus on customer success.”

“By providing an application that is built on Force.com, we are ensuring the highest level of integration and ease of delivery for our customers that use Salesforce CRM,” said Godard Abel, CEO of BigMachines. “We strive to offer the most value to our customers and this application will streamline the ability for sales reps and channel partners to easily produce high-quality, consistent sales documents without leaving their Salesforce CRM interface.”

Force.com is the only proven Platform as a Service for building and running business applications in the cloud. The Force.com platform powers the Salesforce CRM applications, more than 800 ISV partner applications like those from CODA and Fujitsu, and more than 85,000 custom applications used by salesforce.com’s 47,700 customers such as Japan Post, Kaiser Permanente, KONE and Sprint Nextel.

Force.com is the fastest platform for building and deploying complex business applications. Unlike a stack of disparate client/server hardware and software products, Force.com unifies the development and deployment model from the database to the device, allowing developers to easily assemble applications with clicks, components and code, and then instantly deploy them on salesforce.com’s trusted global infrastructure. Customers and partners are using Force.com to build all kinds of business applications from supply chain management to compliance tracking, brand management, accounts receivable, claims processing applications and much more

Filed Under: dreamforce, salesforce

SalesForce Appy Awards 2007

September 23, 2007 By Manoj Jasra Leave a Comment

Below is a video of the winners of the Appy awards at Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce 2007. [NYSE: CRM]

Appy Award winners represent the salesforce.com customers who are truly driving innovation and unlimited success with the Salesforce on-demand platform. Consisting of 14 award categories, the Appy Awards cover almost every conceivable area of customer success.

Filed Under: dreamforce, salesforce

Salesforce Update with Kraig Swensrud

September 21, 2007 By Manoj Jasra Leave a Comment

Kraig Swensrud, Senior Director of Marketing Products stops by to talk about Salesforce’s winter 2008 release (including integration with Google), global campaign management, the new platform force.com and Visual Force (customizable interfaces). Kraig also discussed a company called Appirio who has created the ability to develop Google Applications for Salesforce reports.

Filed Under: dreamforce, salesforce

The Next Big Thing – Dreamforce 2007

September 19, 2007 By Manoj Jasra Leave a Comment

Tuesday’s keynote session at Dreamforce also talked about the “Next Big Thing” (integration with Salesforce) and included presentations from the following CEOs:

Josh James, Chief Executive Officer, Omniture
Dave Duffield, Chief Executive Officer, Workday
Philip Rosedale, Chief Executive Officer, Linden Lab

Workday integrated with Salesforce to their HR Management product, Omniture released a new integration with Salesforce last week which allowed better management of leads/sales and Linden Lab I was suren’t how they were related to Salesforce but showed some great integrations with Second Life. Check out a recap of their session below:

Filed Under: dreamforce, Omniture, salesforce

George Lucas and Bob Thurman at DreamForce

September 19, 2007 By Manoj Jasra Leave a Comment

Day 2 of Salesforce DreamForce was kicked off with a conversation between George Lucas and Bob Thurman in which they discussed the importance of global education. George Lucas’ Educational Foundation strives to teach kids/teens to learn using innovative methods. Check out Edutopia for more information.

The George Lucas Educational Foundation (GLEF) was founded in 1991 as a nonprofit operating foundation to celebrate and encourage innovation in schools. Since that time, we have been documenting, disseminating, and advocating for exemplary programs in K-12 public schools to help these practices spread nationwide.

Check out a short clip of their conversation below: