SalesforceWatch.com

Summer '08 Release Notes

Thanks to Steven Andersen (gokubi.com) and my Twitter addiction, I just learned that the Summer '08 Release Notes are now available.

Steve highlights some functionality over at his blog.

And, as I was typing this, the Summer '08 preview page went live at the Successforce site.  NOTE: None of the links are working yet.

Update: Links are working!

Benioff on CNBC

Marc Benioff made an appearance (fresh haircut?) on CNBC this morning to discuss the Salesforce/Google announcement with CNBC's Melissa Francis.

And, since CNBC does not allow the video to be embedded, you'll have to go check it out on their site directly.

Melissa pushes him on Google acquisition rumors to which he answers (on the second try), "...as a public company CEO, I can't comment on rumors of acquisition."

Salesforce for Google Apps

As many expected, today Salesforce has announced the launch of "Salesforce for Google Apps". The embargo was lifted at midnight and Mashable! and Techcrunch appeared to be first out of the gate with their coverage.

The new product is available immediately to existing Salesforce customers (get started here) and includes tight integration with Gmail, Gtalk, Google Docs and Google Calendar.

You can watch the announcement live at 3pm EST today.

A flurry of tweets in the Twitterverse.....

A video demo from Salesforce is after the jump:

Continue reading "Salesforce for Google Apps"

Summer '08 Release

All signs are pointing to summer...  the Salesforce Summer '08 release that is.

Keep your eye on this URL for Ideas tagged "comming_in_summer_08". (RSS feed)

The usual logo contest has been running for a couple of weeks on the IdeaExchange. (I voted for the Orange Cremecicle)

According to a conversation overheard at the Philly City Tour, the pre-release should be available for sign-up in a few weeks.

Benioff vs. Plattner

Last night, Salesforce.com's Marc Benioff and SAP's Hasso Plattner debated the future of enterprise software at a Churchill Club event at the Computer History museum in Mountain View, California.

Salesforce has audio from the event archived at their investor site.

CNET's Dan Farber has a good analysis on his Outside the Lines blog; he gives the win to Benioff.

(Thanks to those who wrote in with this one.)

Bonus Time

In a Form 8-K filed yesterday, Salesforce published its cash bonuses to named executive officers. Here's who got what:

Marc Benioff: $0
Steve Cakebread: $262,500 (the best paid Salesforce admin I know)
Kenneth Juster: $175,000
Jim Steele: $262,500

Additionally, the following mid-year bonuses were paid on September 28, 2007:

Steve Cakebread: $67,500
Kenneth Juster: $45,000
Jim Steele: $67,500

Read the full filling.

Benioff Making Annoucement Next Month; also driving to work, eating lunch and picking up dry cleaning

On Tuesday, Salesforce invited analysts to hear CEO Marc Benioff speak on April 14th.

According to the invitation, "Marc Benioff will be hosting a special event and making some important annoucements..."

As Adam points out, should make for some interesting fodder between now and then.

Starbucks Using the Force

Salesforce has another Fortune 500 company using the Ideas application to power their "customer suggestion" portal.

Starbucks has started promoting the "my Starbucks Idea" site on their homepage - the site is running at force.com with a custom url (mystarbucksidea.force.com).

The site has a clean look and feel and they appear to already have a good number of ideas and comments.

First Starbucks drops breakfast sandwiches, now they launch Ideas, what's next - losing the tip jar? :)

Jeff Jarvis has highlighted some of the more interesting ideas at his blog.

Check out the site.

(via Jeff Jarvis)

Benioff Meets with Cisco

Tom Foremski follows up last month's Oracle/Salesforce post with this bit about Salesforce and Cisco:

A senior source close to Cisco, said that Mr Benioff was summoned as a direct result of my post. One of his meetings was with executives of Webex, a software as a service (SAAS) company acquired by Cisco last year for $3.2bn in cash.

Read his take.

CNET Interviews Benioff

CNET's Dan Farber and Charles Cooper interview Marc Benioff for their Newsmakers feature.

"CNET News.com caught up with Benioff to talk about the future of software services as well as his plans to re-create Software.com as more of a computing platform."

A couple highlights:

Benioff on MSFT: I think Microsoft is still a dinosaur

Benioff on platform as a service: It's taken about a decade of Salesforce to kind of get the software service movement to really happen. We will be 10 years old on March 8 of next year. People overestimate what you can do in a year and they underestimate what you can do in a decade, unless you're (Apple CEO) Steve Jobs.

Benioff on online productivity applications: Those are not technologies that we want to create. We have our hands full in terms of doing our core areas.

Read the full interview.

No, Salesforce.com Doesn't Have Anything to Worry About

That is my answer to Erick Schonfeld's [rhetorical] question posted this morning, Zoho People Launches for Free. Does Salesforce.com Have Anything to Worry About?, on TechCrunch.

While the Zoho suite of apps may be fine for personal use or even small-business use, Salesforce's bread-and-butter customers are not going to be taking their multi-hundred or multi-thousand seat installations that are most likely integrated with other legacy systems and migrating them to Zoho.

These customers expect a level of service, performance and trust that Salesforce has spent the past 9 years building and it's going to take a lot more than a free/$4 month service to move them.

Salesforce and Apple iPhone SDK

At today's Apple iPhone event, Salesforce's Chuck Dietrich, vice president of mobile, demos Salesforce.com functionality built natively on the iPhone using Apple's new developer SDK.

According to Dietrich, just one Salesforce developer ("Jason"), built the demo in two weeks. CNET TV has a video of the demonstration.

Reaction from the Twittersphere:

Dave Huston: boring salesforce.com app demo on iPhone
AceyTech: Salesforce.com demo, **yawn**
Craig Patchett: Salesforce.com demo. Nice-looking app, also put together in 2 weeks.
hikikomori: Maybe the Salesforce guys should have come on before Spore.

More Tour de Force Dates Announced

Salesforce has recently announced four more dates for their Tour de Force developer roadshow.

April 8: Atlanta
April 10: Chicago
April 16: New York (Benioff keynote)
April 22: Boston

Here's a video they posted on YouTube promoting the event:

Update: Here's Benioff's keynote from the San Francisco Tour de Force event:

Reminder: 4th Quarter and Fiscal 2008 Financial Results Tomorrow (2/27/08)

Just a reminder that Salesforce.com's Q4 and Fiscal 2008 earnings call will be held tomorrow, February 27, 2008 at 5:00pm EST.

Listen to the audio webcast or dial-in at:
Domestically – (866) 901-SFDC or (866) 901-7332
Internationally – (706) 902-1764
Passcode: salesforce.com or 34062469

Benioff at Adobe Engage 2008

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff spoke at today's Adobe Engage 2008, an invitation-only event on the future of applications and the web.  Adobe is launching new versions of AIR and Flex at the event and Salesforce announced the availability of the new Force.com toolkit for Adobe AIR and Flex.

Uber-blogger Robert Scoble was at the event and using Qik, an application that can stream live video from your cell phone, he recorded Benioff's presentation (Salesforce's Steve Fisher was also part of the presentation).

You can catch an archive of the live stream on Scoble's Qik page:

Benioff at Abobe Engage: Part 1 (27 min.)
Benioff at Adobe Engage: Part 2 (4 min.)

More coverage:
Ben Galbraith's Blog: Salesforce
ZDNet.com: Marc Benioff on AIR (and Flex plus Flash)

Salesforce Party

Salesforce held a 70's themed private party last night at the Nob Hill Masonic Center and this Salesforce employee was smitten with one of the bartenders....

Salesforce External Storage Device Stolen from Vehicle

The Breach Blog is reporting that an unencrypted external storage device was stolen from a vehicle.

The device contains personal information on current and previous Salesforce.com employees. According to a breach notification sent to the New Hampshire State Attorney General's office, no customer data was stored on the stolen device.

As a precaution, Salesforce is providing 12-months of credit monitoring for employees at no charge.

Salesforce/Oracle Deal?

Silicon Valley Watcher's Tom Foremski is reporting that a reliable source tells him Salesforce.com has approached Oracle about a potential sale.

If you've had your fill of Microsoft/Yahoo news this week, read Tom's complete analysis.

More coverage:
TechCrunch: Salesforce Shopping Itself To Oracle For $75/Share
ZDNet: Salesforce pitching to Oracle at $75 a share
deal architect: salesforce.com in play?

Success Tours: Save the Date

The dates and locations for Salesforce's first quarter '08 success tours are out (Note: I updated the dates on Feb. 9th based on information from the Spring '08 partner briefing):

March 18: Houston, TX - JW Marriott
March 19: Denver, CO - Hyatt Regency Denver
April 1: Philadelphia, PA - Hyatt Regency Philadelphia
April 3: Santa Clara, CA - Hyatt Regency Santa Clara
April 8: Austin, TX - Hilton Austin
April 10: Huntington Beach, CA - Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach
April 15: Miami, FL - InterContinental Miami
April 17: Montreal, Canada - Hyatt Regency Montreal

Registration: 1:30pm - 2:30pm
Success Tour Sessions: 2:30pm - 5:00pm
Expo Networking Reception: 5:00pm - 6:30pm

Reminder: Spring '08 Release Starts This Weekend

Just a reminder that the Spring '08 release of Salesforce.com will start rolling out to customers this weekend.

NA0, NA1, NA5 - February 8th
NA2, NA3, NA4 - February 15th
EU0, AP0 - February 16th

For specific times, you can view the entire schedule at trust.salesforce.com.

Presidential Campaigns Using Campaignforce

Today, on the eve of Super Tuesday, Salesforce announced that almost 30 political campaigns and advocacy groups are using Campaignforce.

Campaignforce is a customized version of Salesforce.com created specifically for these groups. Some customers include the Ron Paul and Mitt Romney presidential campaigns, Senator John Kerry and Rep. Michael McCaul in Texas.

"Our vision is to replicate the same success that businesses have achieved using Internet technologies such as Facebook, YouTube and salesforce.com with how we run our campaign," said Justine Lam, online campaign manager, Ron Paul for President. "Salesforce has played an integral part in our Internet fundraising success and in harnessing the power of our volunteers around the country during the primaries."

Read the full press release.

WSJ Profiles Salesforce's Susan St. Ledger

In this weeks Wall Street Journal "How I Got Here" feature, the paper profiles Salesforce.com's Susan St. Ledger. St. Ledger is Senior vice president, High Tech and Manufacturing Vertical.

On her move from Sun to Salesforce.com:

Sun was an amazing company. I really had a fabulous experience there. I learned a ton. I really feel like they shaped my career. But I had been there 12-and-a-half years, and I felt like I wasn't growing at the same pace that I had been growing at earlier in my career. I had discussions with several mentors, and one of them asked what I really needed to round out my resume and take it to the next step. Timing was everything. I wasn't actively looking, but I had just started to think seriously about what a move might look like and at that point, I received a call from salesforce.com. When I got to know them better and saw their vision, it just completely blew me away. I couldn't resist the challenge.

Read the profile at WSJ.

Tag, You're It

The Salesforce.com User Experience Team has another call out for usability testers for January 30th and February 1st. The subject of this test is the "tag" feature of Salesforce.com. 

Buy Salesforce on Craigslist

Came across this firesale on Criagslist tonight:

"I am offering our salesforce CRM software. I have purchased the service and no longer need it, but it does everything! I paid $17,000+ for it and have a 1 year contract that I do not need anymore."

I'm guessing the folks in Legal would have something to say about this. From the MSA (emphasis mine):

Salesforce.com hereby grants you a non-exclusive, non-transferable, worldwide right to use the Service, solely for your own internal business purposes, subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement. All rights not expressly granted to you are reserved by salesforce.com and its licensors.

Salesforce VP of Product Strategy Leaves for Cloud9 Analytics

Salesforce.com VP of product strategy, Per Brondum Jakobsen, has left the company for the on-demand sales analytics firm, Cloud9 Analytics, where he will be SVP of product management.

Prior to salesforce.com, Jakobsen managed product teams for several other Bay Area companies, including Sigaba, Ventaso and Onwire Technologies. He also spent ten years with Oracle where he ran product management for the tools division, designing a set of cross-platform UI report writers and report servers, and Developer/2000, Oracle's flagship development toolset.

Source: tmcnet

Tour de Force Kicks Off Today; Developer Announcements include Utility Pricing

Salesforce.com's Tour de Force Roadshow kicks off today in San Francisco. And along with it, come a slew of announcements aimed at developers, including a rebranding of the Apex Developer Network (ADN) to developer.force.com.

Packaged under the DaaS moniker (Development as a Service), the tools include:

Force.com Metadata API

Force.com IDE

Force.com Sandbox

Force.com Code Share

Utility Pricing for Force.com - "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. Customer must purchase 5 logins per named user which are good for one month. Force.com Cloud pricing is for occasional-use, widely-deployed apps and is available for platform use only and not for CRM applications."

And, the previous announcement that Apex is now available in Enterprise Edition.

Watch Adam Gross, VP, Platform Marketing, demo the new DaaS tools in this video on the Salesforce Developer Wiki.

Other coverage:
Between the Lines: Salesforce adds $5 per login pricing option and new developer tools
CenterNetworks: SalesForce Updates Force.com Platform and Offers New Pricing and $1 Million Developer Challenge
TechCrunch: Salesforce.com To Offer DaaS Service, New Pricing Model, Competition

New Design for Message Boards

As I mentioned the other night, the Salesforce community forums (including the Developer forums) have undergone a redesign.

While it's largely cosmetic -- a MUCH cleaner look, IMHO -- there is a new tagging feature that enables you to set a tag or tags on any forum post.

Additionally, there are a couple of tag widgets and a "My Subscriptions" widget on the main forum page.

Check it out.

Salesforce Usability Tests

According to recents posts on the User Experience Blog, the Salesforce.com User Experience Team is looking for participants for two usability tests next week.

Salesforce Administrators, week of January 14th
Salesforce Developers, Friday, January 18th

Keep your eye on the team's blog for more opportunities to participate.

Salesforce SVP Bails for Salesgenie.com

Today Salesgenie.com announced that Mark Israelsen, Salesforce.com's SVP of Global Professional Services,  joined the company as president.

Prior to joining Salesforce, Israelsen was Vice President of Global Alliances and Channels at Oracle.

Mr. Israelsen said, "It's a great honor to join Salesgenie.com and have the opportunity to build on its reputation as the leading provider of sales leads and mailing lists."

Spring '08 Details on Successforce

Looks like Salesforce just pushed out feature detail pages for the Spring '08 release onto the Successforce.com website.

Some features that are sure to interest:

Apex Code in Enterprise Edition (with new Apex Sandbox)
Sandbox to Production
Advanced Validation Rules
Apex Code Packaging
Outer Joins Reporting

UPDATE: The main Spring '08 release page is here. It includes the pre-release signup, detailed release notes, video tour and admin preview.

Spring '08 Roll-Out Starts Next Month

Users are starting to get notices from Salesforce regarding the roll-out of the Sping '08 release.

The maintenance windows for customers are:

NA1:  Friday, February 8th, 8pm PST - Saturday, February 9th, 2am PST
NA3:  Friday, February 15th, 8pm PST - Saturday, February 16th, 2am PST
NA4:  Friday, February 15th, 8pm PST - Saturday, February 16th, 2am PST
NA5:  Friday, February 8th, 8pm PST - Saturday, February 9th, 2am PST

If you are on a different instance and have received your upgrade email, leave me a comment with the dates and I'll update the post.

(Hat Tip: Bryan)

Spring is in the Air

"Coming in Spring 08" ideas are now by flagged by Saleseforce at the Ideas site.  There are two pages of new features at last count.

A couple of the more popular ideas included in this release include processing inbound email in Salesforce.com and scheduling dashboard refreshes.

Salesforce's Thomas Tobin has posted a helpful writeup about the dashboard refresh feature on the Reporting and Dashboards Blog.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

Polly Sumner Joins Salesforce.com

Salesforce.com announced today that Polly Sumner is joining the firm as President, Platform, Alliances and Services.  She will report directly to Benioff and oversee "the technology and marketing for the company's Force.com platform, alliances with global independent software vendors and service partners, and salesforce.com's professional services organization."

Sumner worked at Oracle from 1987 to 1999 and was most recently President of Global Services for Telcordia.

According to this article on witi.com, Larry Ellison once described her as "the most aggressive man he's ever met."

Read the full press release.

Better Late Than Never

Those of you that attended Dreamforce '06 probably remember the Mac vs PC style "commercials" that were shown before the keynote. I had trouble finding them online until now (the beauty of RSS feeds).

So, here you are, 14 months late.

Oh, and Happy New Year too :)

Salesforce.com Million Customer Chocolate Bars

Based on this eBay auction, it looks like Salesforce presented its employees with 4 chocolate bars commemorating their 1,000,000 subscriber mark.

You can buy three of the bars described as "...sickly sweet, but decent for making cookies with..." from this employee.

In addition to the description of the chocolate bars, you'll find this gem:

It doesn't make up for the 10% of our bonus that HR cuts off without telling us because we didn't meet some alleged profit milestones set by who-knows.  Maybe you can help me buy that porche my manager promised me when I joined years and years ago.

Update: The chocolate bars went for $12.50 - what a bargain! Looks like the lucky winner is Treb Ryan, CEO of OpSource. Phil Wainewright has additional coverage at ZDNet.

Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow

Salesforce held a Winter Wonderland party in Singapore yesterday at Bar Cocoon in Clarke Quay.  Check out a few photos on the Live!Studios blog.

Update: More photos here.

Salesforce Ideas - Limited Release

Salesforce Ideas will be in limited release beginning December 8th.  Launched as part of the recent Winter '08 edition of Salesforce.com, Ideas will be available to all editions except Group.

If you'd like to participate in the limited release, you need to contact your Account Executive.

Read the full post at Successforce.com.

Update: Salesforce's Jaime Grenney has posted a few demos for the Ideas product.

Spring '08 Pre-Release Around the Corner

Salesforce is offering AppExchange partners the opportunity to have their developer orgs migrated to the Spring '08 Pre-Release the first week of January.

According to the schedule on the Apex Wiki, the pre-release program is running through February 8, 2008.  Maybe we'll see Spring '08 in late Feb????  Or, will we see it at Dreamforce Europe in early May??

In any event, if you're a partner, you have until December 31st to act.

Salesforce to Salesforce Service Announced Today

According to this post on TechCrunch, Salesforce is announcing their "Salesforce-to-Salesforce" (S2S) service today.

The service will allow companies using Salesforce.com to share data with one another. The cost of $100 per month will be paid by the company that initiates the connection.

Salesforce claims to be modeling S2S off the sharing functionality of social networks like Facebook. To share data, such as leads or plans, you simply search for contacts from within your browser and create “connections” with them. Data objects land in their inboxes, from which they can choose to accept the objects or not. Once accepted, updates to the objects will show up for both companies that have access to them. Company representatives say that data sharing can also be set up to occur in a more automated fashion.

The company also announced that they will top the 1 million subscriber mark by the end of December.

Read the full post on TechCrunch.

Other Coverage:
SaaS Will Never Be the Same - Again : Zoli's Blog
Salesforce.com rolls out customer data sharing; eyes 1 million subscribers : ZDNet Between the Lines
Salesforce plans Facebook-style business links : vnunet.com

Benioff Named Top Business Leader

According to this press release, Silicon.com has announced that Marc Benoff has been named a 2007 Agenda Setters and Top Ten Business Leader.

"Marc Benioff has helped define Software-as-a-Service, which is why he deserves to be singled out," said Tony Hallett, editor of silicon.com. "It's not the first time Benioff has been featured in the Agenda Setters list, but he is up 18 places from last year's position. There was a growing feeling among our judges that on-demand is really coming of age and Benioff is seen as its torch-bearer."

This is Benioff's third time on the Agenda Setter list and second time on the Top Ten Business Leader list.  You can see the entire list at: http://www.siliconagendasetters.com. 

For each of the agenda setters, you can cast your vote to agree or disagree with the panel's rating.  As of this writing, 53% of readers believe that Benioff's rank of 12 is too low.

Identity Confirmation Rolling Out Next Week

In addition to the API changes covered earlier, Salesforce is implementing "Identity Confirmation" as part of its security enhancements.

This change will be rolled out to NA0, NA1, NA2, NA3, NA4 and EMEA servers on Tuesday, December 4th.

...you will need to take additional steps only if you log in to Salesforce from a different computer and from an unrecognized location. The exact steps will vary depending on whether you access Salesforce via a browser, via a desktop application (such as Outlook Edition, Apex Data Loader, or Office Edition) or via another API-based application.

You can watch a webinar of the new process here.

New API Security Features Rolling Out

During this weekend's maintenance window On November 26th, Salesforce will be rolling out "enhanced API security features" for all users.  From an email to partners:

"...The enhanced API is now based on an trusted network security model. Customers will need to explicitly "whitelist" trusted IP address ranges from inside their Salesforce orgs to prevent unauthorized logins via the API. Individual users can also generate an API token from within Salesforce to use in place of their passwords for applications that rely on the API. This may occur when they access your applications from an unknown IP address range (e.g. home, airport, Starbucks hotspot).

To minimize the impact of this upgrade, existing customer whitelists will be automatically populated with IP addresses ranges that have been in active use during the past four months. If your customers have been actively using your application, or your integration has been running during this timeframe, it is likely that your IP address range will be automatically included as part of their new whitelist..."

Additionally, Salesforce will be holding a security webinar on Friday, November 16th at 10:00am PST. 

Please join us on Friday, November 16 to understand recent issues and outline what our customers and partners can do to increase security. You will learn:

- Recent phishing issues and salesforce.com
- What salesforce.com is doing to increase security
- What you can do to increase security

Update (6:28pm 11/15/07): Just heard from Salesforce that the activity was pushed back a weekend to give them more time to reach out to customers and partners.

Scheduled Maintenance Windows

Salesforce has posted the maintenance schedule for this weekend at trust.salesforce.com - half-hour increments starting at 7:00pm PST.

Salesforce.com and MediaWiki Integration

MediaWiki is a free software package that was the basis for Wikipedia.  Eric Santiago has created a MediaWiki extension for describing and querying salesforce objects using wiki markup tags.

...allow users the ability to access Saleforce.com. Very useful for admins looking to document customizations or for anyone looking to make Salesforce data available though a public interface. Recommended for Intranet usage...

I'm Alive and Catch-Up

Thanks for all of the emails wondering where I've been! :)  I'm here, I'm back!  Went off the grid at the end of October for a trip to Italy.

You've no doubt heard about and read about the Salesforce.com employee who fell victim to a phishing scam which allowed a Salesforce.com customer contact list to be stolen. Plenty of coverage all around the web.

Also, the Winter '08 release is now live.  Links to features, admin notes, etc can be found on the home page of Successforce.com.

Winter '08 Release Notes

The release notes for Winter '08 are now available. Like the looks of the Apex email service (page 49). Still grokking Salesforce Network.....

Winter '08 Slated for Early November

Looks like the Salesforce.com Winter '08 release will be pushed out the first two weekends in November, depending upon the server.

NA0, NA1, NA5 are slated for November 2 - 3, while NA2, NA4, NA3, EU0 are slated for November 9 - 10. You can check out the full schedule at trust.salesforce.com.

(via CRM FYI and Aiden, thanks!)