'Salesforce.com 2.0' Promoted
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Everyone knows Salesforce.com Inc. as the company that pioneered software as a service (SAAS) and survived the dot-com bust when many other application service providers (ASPs) didn't. Now, Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff said the company is ready to take on Microsoft Corp. as a leading development platform provider, a strategy he unveiled as "Salesforce.com 2.0" in New York on Tuesday.
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InfoWorld - Everyone knows Salesforce.com as the company that pioneered SaaS (software as a service) and survived the dot-com bust when many other ASPs didn&#39;t. Now, Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff says the company is ready to take on Microsoft&#160;as a leading development platform provider, a strategy he unveiled as &quot;Salesforce.com 2.0&quot; in New York on Tuesday.
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(InfoWorld) - Salesforce.com on Tuesday unveiled a new version of its hosted customer relationship management service, which it said will add a new portal and workflow management capabilities and ease the process of writing and testing new custom applications. The new version of the service comes just days after Microsoft introduced its much anticipatedÂ entryÂ into the hosted CRM business. The 23rd version of the Salesforce.com service lets users access the company's proprietary Apex Code programming language to customize their CRM applications or write new ones to run on Salesforce.com servers, the company said. "Customers can write code that runs on our servers -- it's programming without software," said Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, in a statement. The company said that Apex Code is similar to the widely used Java language and that applications written using it can be accessed via Web standards such as XML or SOAP. The new version also adds what Salesforce.com calls Intelligent Workflow, which will allow users to add rules to business processes. A new on-demand Customer Portal can deliver Web 2.0 collaborative content to customers, the company said. The Intelligent Workflow capability will come in handy at Salesforce.com customerÂ Enviance, an on-demand environmental regulation compliance software provider based in Carlsbad, Calif., said Michele Hincks, vice president of marketing at the company. Enviance has been running Salesforce.com since 2004 for sales, marketing and customer service, but the workflow management capabilities have thus far been very rudimentary, she said. The workflow tool will allow the company to use custom fields help process new customers and perform other tasks, Hincks said. She also said she expects that marketing personnel at Enviance will be able to use Apex Code to custom-build applications, so they will no longer have to wait for IT programmers to get to such projects. "It seems it will be more usable," she said. "I can cut and paste code myself." Mike Epner, vice president of worldwide services and support at Borland Software, said that his firm will create several new applications to run on the Salesforce.com platform. In addition, Borland plans to use the new version's portal to deliver technical support content to Borland customers. "The new release continues the evolution from software as a service to platform as a service," said Denis Pombriant, analyst at Beagle Research Group LLC. "Platform as a service enables CIOs to concentrate less on keeping their infrastructures running while spending more time on deriving business benefits for their companies." The new version of Salesforce.com, called Summer '07, will be available in August.
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Whoo oo oo ooo... Can you feel the force? Dreamforce Chief executive Marc Benioff today kicked-off Salesforce.com's fifth, annual Dreamforce conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco by citing customer numbers, growing developer and partner channels, and increased revenues as proof that Salesforce.com will force its way onto the software industry's table.â¦
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Can you handle Dylan and the Devsters? The barrel-scraping netherworld of corporate anthems is agog at Salesforce.com's groundbreaking new hip-hop opus, "Dev Life".â¦
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By MICHAEL LIEDTKE  SAN FRANCISCO - Online software pioneer Salesforce.com Inc. will help Internet search leader Google Inc. sell ads as part of a partnership that falls short of Wall Street's anticipation since word of the alliance leaked last month.
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Salesforce.comÂ is starting to provide some details about the next version of its hosted CRM (customer relationship management) software, including the product's primary focus, which will be customization.
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Hosted CRM company introduces a new framework for linking analysis tools to its applications.Image: Salesforce dashboard
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Benioff resists Office 2.0 distraction Salesforce.com wants to be many things to all people. But a move into hosted office productivity apps won't be appearing on its agenda anytime soon.â¦
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A customer can connect to Google's AdWords and create an ad linked to particular search results. Anyone clicking on that ad is then encouraged to complete a form with their contact details, which then automatically becomes a new lead in Salesforce.com's CRM package.
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The online software pioneer Salesforce.com will help the Internet search leader Google sell ads as part of a partnership.
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Salesforce.com unveiled the 23rd version of its hosted CRM service, adding a customer portal and access to its proprietary programming language.
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Interested in trying out the free OpenOffice.org 2.0 office suite without having to install it on your computer?Now's your chance.That option became possible Tuesday when OpenOffice.org and online application vendor Ulteo launched a beta project that hosts OpenOffice.org 2.0 on Ulteo's Online Desktop infrastructure, giving users online access to the applications and up to 1GB of related data storage.In an announcement, the two groups said the project will be open to 15,000 beta users who will be able to access the applications using a Web browser on Windows, Linux or Mac OS X.Beta users will also have access to the project's instant collaboration features, which will allow participants to invite other users to join them online in working on a document together in real time. Users can send invitations to others via e-mail, allowing access to documents in either read-only or full edit mode through a clickable link in the message."Now everyone can use OpenOffice.org from any connected PC, anytime, anywhere," Florian Effenberger, marketing project co-lead of OpenOffice.org, said in a statement. "You even can work together on documents online and collaborate with others. This especially is an interesting option for trainers and workgroups.""Ulteo is very proud to deliver OpenOffice.org to the community in a new, useful and exciting way: online and designed for collaboration," Thierry Koehrlen, CEO of Ulteo, said in a statement. "We expect that it will ... spread OpenOffice.org to even more users now that it is simpler than ever to try and? use it in a couple of clicks."Users can register for the beta program at Ulteo's Web site.
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BusinessWeek Online - Salesforce.com's  shares gained on Dec. 12, after the software services provider hiked its forecasts on sales for 2008.
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InfoWorld - Next Monday, Salesforce.com will, in the words of one industry analyst, &quot;extend the value proposition of software as a service&quot; when it introduces Visualforce at its Dreamforce Conference in San Francisco.
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(InfoWorld) - Next Monday, Salesforce.com will, in the words of one industry analyst, "extend the value proposition of software as a service" when it introduces Visualforce at its Dreamforce Conference in San Francisco. The Visualforce layer introduces the user interface as a service. Visualforce is the latest component of Salesforce.com's Platform-as-a-Service, which the company announced earlier this summer as Force.com. Other components include the database and logic portions. Visualforce will allow Salesforce.com customers to design custom application interfaces while incorporating other technologies such as HTML, AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), and Adobe Flex. The company made the move following requests from customers who wanted to present a more diverse UI, rather than creating applications that had a similar look and feel to the Salesforce.com CRM, according to Ariel Kelman, senior director of platform product marketing at Salesforce.com. Doug Menefee, CIO at The Schumacher Group, sounded quite enthusiastic about what he could do with Visualforce, although he hadn't used it yet. "By being able to build applications utilizing Visualforce, we will be able to build custom interfaces that improve workflow and productivity for data-entry-intensive job functions," said Menefee. Menefee was also pleased about the opportunity to build wizards in Visualforce. According to Jeff Kaplan, managing director of THINKstrategies, with each user conference, Salesforce adds another layer of value to SaaS (software as a service). Up until now, customization has been a thorn in the side of SaaS. It has been a topic of concern and criticism by SaaS skeptics, said Kaplan. "This new feature and capability is a clear indication of how quickly the SaaS industry is evolving to permit customization. And it is another example [of] how those misconceptions of the past are continually being eroded by these developments," Kaplan said. Menefee said that Visualforce will allow his organization to apply best practices to user interface design in various applications. This, in turn, will let them customize the employee experience based on their needs for data entry or viewing. Visualforce uses a "page-based model" built on current Web presentation technology and adds a component library for incorporating common interface elements. The UI platform tool leverages the data, logic, and workflow capabilities found in the greater Force.com platform. Among the features included in Visualforce are the following: * Pages, which allow developers to create pages using standard Web technologies. * Components, which allow companies to assemble current user interface elements in a new UI. * Logic Controllers for creating user interface behavior. Visualforce will be available for developer preview next week and generally available in the fourth quarter.
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SAN FRANCISCO -- At the Dreamforce 2004 Salesforce.com user conference on Monday, the company that says "just say no to packaged applications" continued to expand on its strategy of tightly integrating its hosted solution with in-house enterprise applications.