Salesforce Chatter looks to completely transform the way you collaborate with people in your company. As both a collaboration application and a platform for building social cloud-computing apps, Chatter helps you connect and share information securely like never before—all in real time. Chatter welcome’s you to the new world of work collaboration, where everyone is more productive and makes smarter business decisions.
Dreamforce 2008: Force.com for Facebook
November 4, 2008 By 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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
Dreamforce 2008: Informatica Announces On Demand Data Synchronization Service
November 4, 2008 By 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:
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Powerful mapping framework for designing multi-object transformations
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Intuitive web-based wizard with over 100 built-in functions for building transformation rules
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Flexible job orchestration for managing complex transformation rules involving multiple Salesforce CRM Orgs, files and databases.
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Simple web-based management console for monitoring all data synchronization jobs
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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
Dreamforce 2008: BigMachines Announces New Sales Document Application
November 4, 2008 By 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
SalesForce and Google Apps Integration
April 14, 2008 By 1 Comment
Salesforce.com [NYSE: CRM], and Google [Nasdaq: GOOG] today expanded their global strategic alliance to make it easy for companies of all sizes to run their business in the cloud with Salesforce for Google Apps. The combination of the Google Apps™ suite of productivity applications and the Salesforce suite of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications enables businesses to effectively communicate and collaborate without any hardware or software to download, install or maintain. Salesforce for Google Apps also leverages the Force.com Platform and Google’s open APIs, opening up even more development opportunities for developers and partners.
Communicate Directly from Salesforce
With Gmail, you can email customers and colleagues directly from within Salesforce. Log messages from Gmail automatically into Salesforce lead and contact records and eliminate the need to transfer information manually between the two applications in which you spend most of your time. Create new email messages from within Salesforce records—or any time you see an email address in Salesforce—and the recipient is added automatically to the To line. Plus, you can view past correspondence with your contacts in one place, and so can your colleagues with appropriate access levels.
Instantly Chat with Colleagues and Customers
Google Talk makes it easy for internal sales teams or customer-facing support teams to collaborate during sales calls, while coordinating with partners, and when servicing customer issues—all without leaving Salesforce. Google Talk is included in the sidebar within Salesforce, so you don’t have to switch between applications while reviewing CRM data. Using the power of instant messaging, you can instantly share information, coordinate changes, and plan next steps. Then save chats in Gmail and associate them with leads or contacts to preserve a record of your conversation for easy access later.
Collaborate in Real Time with Your Teams and Customers
With Google Docs, you can share and collaborate in real time on documents, spreadsheets, and presentations with team members, customers, or partners. Create documents right from Salesforce records without wasting time jumping between two user interfaces. Associate materials with contacts and leads so you never have to dig to find the right ones. Best of all, you can quickly share Web-based documents that everyone can review and edit without worrying about whether they have the latest version.
Quote Generator for Google Docs and Reports Collaboration for Google Spreadsheets (both powered by Astadia from the AppExchange) let you generate quotes and export reports into Google Docs for easy collaboration. Say goodbye to email attachments and managing multiple versions—working together has never been easier.
Stay Organized and Share Events
Salesforce and Google Calendar help you stay organized and manage all your work and personal events effortlessly. Keep track of your sales meetings, team schedules, and other events from Salesforce (using Appirio’s Sync for Google Calendar from the AppExchange) and share them with others using Google Calendar. Map campaigns in Salesforce to any Google calendar and see them displayed alongside personal or work events with Appirio’s Campaign Timeline (from the AppExchange). With Salesforce and Google Calendar, you can see all your important events at once with the checkbox simplicity and drag-and-drop convenience you would expect from an Internet application.
View Everything That Matters—in a Single Glance
Start your day with a customized, all-in-one view of everything that matters to you and your business with Salesforce and Google Start Page. All your critical work activities, metrics, documents, messages, and other important details are in one place; you can even display dashboard components from Salesforce using Appirio’s CRM Dashboard for Google Start Page (from the AppExchange). Now you can hit the ground running before you finish your first cup of coffee.
Screenshots of Google Docs, Home Page and Chat integration:
Ultimate Guide to Sales Force: Inside CRM
March 5, 2008 By Leave a Comment
If you are looking for some insight on Sales Force automation then I recommend checking out Inside CRM’s Ultimate Guide to Sales Force automation. Their Ultimate Guide contains over a 100 different Sales Force resources in the categories of Tutorials, Tools, Articles, Case Studies and Books. Here are just a few from their list:
Tutorials
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How to Drive Adoption of Your SFA Solution: Get your employees to embrace SFA with these tips.
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Developing an Effective Sales Process for the Enterprise: Use this tutorial to learn how to create sales processes that work.
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Sales Force Management System: This reference from Wikipedia offers an in-depth look at SFA.
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Keeping Pace with the Sales Force Evolution: Learn how to stay on top with this article.
Tools
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NetSuite CRM+: Manage your customers and sales team with this solution.
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Nsite Quote and Proposal Management: Automate the proposal process with this software.
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Salesforce.com: Salesforce.com offers solutions for SFA, relationship management and customer service.
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Oracle Siebel CRM On Demand: Oracle Corp.’s subscription-based service covers sales, service, marketing and contact operations.
Articles
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SFA: Cost Considerations: Make your SFA solution work with your budget using this white paper’s advice.
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Sales Effectiveness Through Knowledge: See how knowledge can help you take your sales to the next level.
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Turning Sales Into Science: See how the sales 2.0 era is being ushered in.
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Sales Force Automation FAQ: Learn the basics of SFA in this article.
Case Studies
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Endeca Extends Salesforce Throughout Enterprise for Accurate Reports, Forecasts and Company Tracking: Find out how this company transitioned from its outgrown contact-management software to a thriving sales-force-management solution.
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Portal to the Future: Postini Increases Productivity Tenfold Without Increasing Staffing Levels: With an SFA system, Postini got better productivity and faster response times.
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Case Study: Sales Force Automation with PocketPC: See how this company found an efficient way to collect sales information from its distributors.
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Beyond Contact Management: Learn about how this carpet maker uses mobile software to process orders.
Books
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“Sales Automation Done Right“: Explore every aspect of SFA and learn how to improve its effectiveness with this book.
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“Perormance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Your Business“: This book will teach you how to use dashboard technology for automation and optimization.
Source: http://www.insidecrm.com/features/ultimate-sfa-guide-030408/
Cloud Computing from Salesforce – Force.com
January 17, 2008 By Leave a Comment
Salesforce.com [NYSE: CRM], today announced Force.com Cloud Computing Architecture. Delivering the power and flexibility of cloud computing to the enterprise, Force.com Cloud Computing Architecture includes a new pay-per-login utility pricing model for the Force.com Platform, and Force.com Development-as-a-Service, a new set of tools and services that will enable enterprise developers to easily harness the promise of cloud computing for application development. With Force.com providing the global infrastructure and services for database, logic, workflow, integration, user interface, application development and application exchange, the Force.com Cloud Computing Architecture offers the most comprehensive set of capabilities to harness cloud computing for the enterprise.
“Cloud computing, or Platform-as-a-Service, has enormous potential for the
enterprise,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. “Cloud
computing offers almost unlimited computing power and collaboration at a massive
scale. With Force.com Platform-as-Service, we are providing the necessary
building blocks to make cloud computing real for the enterprise.”
As part of the Force.com Cloud Computing Architecture, salesforce.com is announcing a new utility pricing model for the Force.com Platform to give customers the flexibility to deploy Platform-as-a-Service applications to users throughout their enterprise based on their usage needs and patterns. CIOs and IT managers now have the power to deploy Force.com for unlimited or per-login usage for regular or occasional users depending on the specific needs of their enterprise.
Customers are Building and Deploying PaaS Apps in the Cloud
Salesforce.com customers have already created more than 50,000 custom applications with the Force.com Platform, such as Accounts Receivable, Bug Enhancement Tracking, Employee Compliance and Training, Emergency Room Staffing, Expense Reporting, Food Ingredient Management, Recruiting, Time Management, and many others. The new Force.com utility pricing model will enable customers to deploy these custom applications throughout their enterprises in ways that make sense base on employee usage patterns.
For example, users in the Account Payable department may use Expense Reporting applications on a daily basis and need unlimited access to them for processing and accounting. Sales or marketing personnel may only need to access an Expense Reporting application once per month or a few times per quarter. The IT department can now take advantage of Force.com to deploy the Expense Reporting application in an unlimited fashion in the Account Payable department, and have per-login usage for sales and marketing employees.
Revolutionary Utility Pricing for Force.com Platform-as-a-Service
Force.com cloud (per login) pricing is now available. The list price is $5.00 per login with a maximum of 5 logins per user per month, and will be offered at a special promotional price of $0.99 per login now through the end of 2008. For more frequent users (more then 5 logins per month), Force.com unlimited pricing continues to be $50 per user per month.
Force.com PaaS – A Cloud Computing Architecture for the Enterprise
The Force.com Platform-as-a-Service provides a comprehensive Cloud Computing Architecture to revolutionize application creation and delivery. Provided completely as a service via the Internet, the Force.com Platform provides the necessary building blocks to enable business application creation and delivery, without the need for software and hardware client-server infrastructure.
Below is a graphic of the Force.com IDE:
