Skip to main content

Salesforce.com social and mobile offerings from Dreamforce



Did you see the tweets of #DF11 in your timeline? Did you happen to see large posters of Microsoft, balloons of Oracle floating around in Sfo? If you still didn't know what was going on, it was Salesforce.com annual Dreamforce conference, which this year saw nearly 45,000 people registering for the event from over 60 countries, according to a Salesforce media statement. This turned to be the largest conference in the software industry. Obviously, if you have anything to do with Salesforce, you would know all this. If you are not, you have definitely heard of it.

It was a futuristic step to deploy a enterprise based CRM on Cloud and yet even after a decade, Salesforce keeps itself way way ahead of the competitors (are there any left now?) in again releasing a futuristic enterprise application.

The key take away from the entire Dreamforce 2011 conference was social and mobile. Salesforce opening the gates for a full fledged enterprise SCRM, where conversation and your leads rest in the same cloud. This Dreamforce, as with all the Dreamforce some more amazing new products where launched.

Social Apps:

1. Chatter Now: Chatter now is a real time chat feature for customers using Chatter. A good idea and many clients were asking for this feature.

2. Chatter Customer Groups: This is a unique concept, users can invite customers and clients in a secure and private chatter.

3. Chatter Approvals: Approval process now have context, where you can upload document and comments at all steps. What is more, users can approve records directly from chatter without leaving it. This is good because chatter feeds is easily available and I can just think of all the possibilities of manipulating the feed into the array of devices. Oh wait, there are already chatter apps on all the platform.

4. Chatter Connect: Chatter connect is a REST Api that can be easily used to integrate into third party applications. It can be used to make any custom mobile app and enterprise app social. Now, that is something very interesting. They also introduced, Chatter for sharepoint, finally lets hope sharepoint is a less boring and interesting.

5. Heroku for Java: The only drawback of Apex and Visualforce was that, it never received a good response from the developer community at large. It is understandable because normally developers look for big, big programming codes and apex achieves a lot in very less code. So with Heroku for Java developers, Salesforce is trying to get approval from the developer community. Heroku is amazing.

Mobile:
1. Touch.salesforce.com: The world is going touch, Salesforce is no different and they also launched a touch version of CRM. One very good feature of touch system is, it works online as well as offline. Also, existing mobile applications will automatically mobile ported plus developers can create robust mobile application.

2. Seesmic CRM for Android: This is not exactly a Salesforce product announcement but a announcement by Salesforce partner, Seesmic. Seesmic has always provided amazing social apps (they were also the one to provide a mobile app for Ning network) and now they have come with complete Salesforce CRM for android. I have used it and it looks amazing for now. Will come with a detailed report soon.

Data:
1. Data.com: I really want to know where they get these domains or how much they pay for it. But Salesforce has launched Data as a Service, Data.com which provides customer data from Jigsaw and D&B. Its just jigsaw with a fancy new domain name.

2. Database.com: Database.com is now generally available, anyone can use it and create a database on cloud, which is also mobile and social.

3. Database.com Data Residency Option: Salesforce.com has taken a step down with this announcement. Database.com does not fully run on public cloud but users now have option to take the data with them on their private servers. Giving a sense of hybrid cloud for their use.

These are pretty interesting product announcement by Salesforce. The company has again proved its way ahead of its competitors. There were other announcement also, like Siteforce now generally available soon etc.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Post

The unofficial guide to become a Certified Salesforce Administrator (ADM 201)

In my attempt at maximum certifications in 60 days, I completed Salesforce Certified Administrator exam on February 11th 2013 So you have decided to ramp up your career and take certifications in your hand. Good choice. It is also likely that this is the first time you have heard of Salesforce, certification and since your company has a vision of you completing the certification you have decided to do it. At this stage it is likely that, You have done extensive googling. You have received countless brain-dumps. And you have received plenty of advise from different types of users which ranges from Admin certification is easier than making coffee to Admin certification is tougher than building a rocket-ship to fly off to the moon. The purpose of this guide is to give you a clear understanding of what to expect when you are expected to become Certified Salesforce Administrator. To bring sense to all the things you have seen so far and to clearly explain what to do and what
72 comments
Read more

Some PDF tricks on Visualforce: Landscape, A4, page number and more

The beauty of Visualforce is simplicity. Remember the shock you received when you were told the entire page renders as PDF if you just add renderAs=PDF to the Page tag. For those who thought I spoke alien language right now, here is the trick, to render a page as PDF, we add a simple attribute to the <apex: page> tag <apex: page renderAs='pdf'> This will render the entire page as PDF. Now, say we need to add some extra features to the PDF. Like a page number in the footer or we need to render the page in landscape mode. Faced with this problem, I put on my Indiana Jones hat and went hunting for it in the vast hay-sack of the internet (read: googled extensively). Imagine my happiness when i found a big big page with many big big examples to solve the problem. The document I am referring to is from W3C, paged Box media . Long story short, I now possess the ultimate secret of rendering the page in any format I want. So here are few tricks I learned from the p
17 comments
Read more

The Basics of writing a Apex Trigger

One of the most important and common asked question on Forums and everywhere is how do I write a trigger. Coding in Apex Trigger is like going to a dentist for a root canal, you keep dreading the moment until you realize it is actually not going to hurt you. If you plan to write an Apex Trigger this quick guide will help you doing so. The first and foremost rule in writing a trigger is to remember the oldest suggestion given to the most comprehensive Hitchhikers Guide to Galaxy, ' Don't Panic. ' Writing a trigger is not a rocket science, in-fact we should thank the team at Salesforce and ForceDotCom for making everything so simple, that anyone can do it. Enough of talk, lets code. So you want to write a trigger. Let us have a glimpse of what we are going to build. The problem statement is as follows Problem:  When the User is entering the Opportunity, check for the Opportunity Amount. If the Opportunity Amount is greater than 50,000. Mark the Parent Account as
21 comments
Read more