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Dreamforce in 140 Characters or Less

Twitter and Jaiku were quite active during this year's Dreamforce conference. I have to agree with Steve Andersen (his 15th "moment"). it was a unique way to follow what was happening and provided instant feedback. I'm hoping more attendees will get into the action next year!

Here's a highlight of what folks were talking about in 140 characters or less.....

"enjoying the calm before the Dreamforce storm...." - df07

"At the Dreamforce conference showfloor. Reception will start at 6:00pm. If you are at thew conference stop by the Adobe booth and say hi." - matzeller

"At salesforce conference...over the top opening yet again" - sonnycloward

"U2 blaring and rubber duckies racing on the big screen" - crmfyi

"Conferences should not start at 7:30am. No mercy for people working the booth (like me here at Dreamforce)." - matzeller

"Dell was able to design a new tablet PC based on ideas from Ideastorm....cool, I want one" - crmfyi

"Only at Dreamforce will modifying an Account screen garner applause." - salesforcewatch

"George Lucas and Uma Thurman's dad on stage here @ the Salesforce.com conference" - sogrady

"waiting for the start of the afternoon panel @ dreamforce feat. nick carr as moderator." - sdm

"At Salesforce.com Dreamforce. Met many peeps thus far - needed more bus cards. The Speakers have been phenomenal. John Chambers - WOW." - bartc

"Totally 80's at the Dreamforce Gala event" - jaschroe

"Dreamforce nonprof track is s p a r s e l y populated." - sdm

"Just did a man on the street interview with Peter Coffee" - gokubi

"almost done with Dreamforce day 2. If I can just stay awake!" - monkshac

"Best sf.com Vertical party...ever! Yeah nonprofits! Tiburon baybeeee" - gokubi

"$200 off OQO for Dreamforce attendees: oqo.com/store use code: DREAM2007" - salesforcewatch

"salesforcemicroeditions.com -temporary site for the Dreamforce show" - salesforcewatch

"back home from Dreamforce 07. productive time and new insight. time to sleep...niighty nite" - evilspinmeister

"I keep trying to hit the Apple key on a windows keyboard. Dreamforce brainwashed me into Mac mode." - colinloretz

"just got a "thank you for stopping at our booth at Dreamforce" email from a vendor. Nice, except I wasn't at Dreamforce." - judis217

"hope everyone that came to dreamforce had a great experience" - df07

"back from a long, fruitful trip to Dreamforce in San Francisco. I was too busy to blog or even twitter while there, but I learned a lot ..." - arrowpointe

Benioff's Dreamforce Keynote

Salesforce has posted the video from Marc Benioff's Dreamforce opening keynote.

They have it broken down into multiple parts.

Dreamforce and Craigslist

I guess it wouldn't be a Dreamforce event without a missed connection on Craigslist.

Lori's Diner this morning at 2:30 AM - you're in town sfdc dreamforce - m4w - 29

Read the full post.

Dreamforce Day 2 Recap

Day 2 of the Dreamforce show started with another keynote general session. The session was delayed by a few minutes while Marc Benioff attended to some fire marshall duties and requested that "all 2,000 people" in the back find an empty seat.

After a video highlighting the work the Salesforce Foundation is doing, things got underway.

George Lucas was the featured guest and he was interviewed by Robert Thurman, co-founder of Tibet House US and father of Uma Thurman.

While the interview didn't flow as smoothly as I think it could have, Lucas delivered his message about his educational foundation, "edutopia". Thurman, however, did manage to fit about a dozen references to Star Wars into the discussion.

The second part of the session started with a well put-together "Salesforce promotional" video created by Bruce Campbell, Salesforce.com's Chief Creative Officer. After the video, Marc called a reluctant, but gracious, Campbell to the stage to be recognized.

Here is the video (more post below the video):

Marc brought three of his friends on stage to demo and talk about their technology: Dave Duffield of Workday, Josh James of Omniture and Philip Rosedale of Linden Lab.

Click below to read more.....

I had to cut out of the session around this time, so I'll point to a few other blogs that have a recap of today's session as well:

Salesforce Collective: Dreamforce Day 2 - George Lucas & Bob Thurman
Vertical Response for AppExchange blog: Tuesday Morning - Dreamforce
Jaiku: Play by Play of the session
demandblog: Dreamforce Day Two
Where's the Upside?: Directions from Dreamforce (Day 1 and 2)

Had a few meetings, met some new people (Hi Liz!) and attended the "Innovation Through Community" session - nice job Kingsley! (Don't forget to comment on the sessions you attended.)

The 2nd Annual Appy Awards were next. Sixteen awards were given out by Marc Benioff and Jim Steele. It was a fun event, alot of back and forth between Marc and Jim, largely centered around the fact that Jim missed the opening keynote yesterday because he took his daughter to the Emmies. Here's a list of the winners, with apologies to the first winner whose category and name I missed.

Best Force.com Integration: Toby Fox, FONE
Best AppExchange Adopter: Matthew Dickerson, Sirva
Chief Innovation Officer Award: Doug Menefee, The Schumacher Group
Salesforce Sales Excellence Award: Teri Stevens, Sybase
Salesforce PRM Excellence Award: Kurt Shaver, GFi
Salesforce Customer Service Award: Mark Silber, Qualcomm
Salesforce Marketing Excellence Award: Katrina Persno and Ashley Landry, Sungard
Best Global Enterprise Deployment: Julie Akawie, ESI
Best Industry Deployment: Hitesh Vora, TD Ameritrade
Best Non-Profit Deployment Award: Robert Bennett, Family Service Agency of SF
Outstanding Customer Innovation Award: Dell, IdeaStorm
Breakthrough App of the Year: Model Metrics, Accelerate4Pharma
Best APEX Developer: Glenn Wilson, CRMFusion
Best Force.com Native App - Partner: Apttus
Dreamforce Best in Show: VerticalResponse

Congratulations to everyone and especially Glenn Wilson @ CRMFusion and the folks at Vertical Response. They are both advertisers and friends of SalesforceWatch.com.

Finished up the day with a nice dinner with some fellow bloggers and platform and ADN folks (Thanks Adam, Gordon, Kingsley, Paul, Peter, Steve and anyone I missed) and a drink at the Vertical Response party at Roe (thanks VR!).

I'll be at the show all day tomorrow, see you there.

Dreamforce Day 1: Around the Web

More coverage from around the web on today's Dreamforce activities.

demandblog: Dreamforce Day One: May the Force.com Be With You
Software as Services: Salesforce.com and the Force family name
Mashable: Salesforce to Launch Community Platform for Clients
tecosystems: Back in San Francisco
VerticalResponse for AppExchange Blog: Monday Afternoon - Dreamforce
Pattern Finder: Dreamforce Announcements: Visualforce and Salesforce Content
Pattern Finder: John Chambers, Then (1987) and Now (2007)
Ragsdale's Eye on Service: Live from Dreamforce 2007

Dreamforce Day 1 Session Feedback

Don't forget, if you attended a session today (Sept 17th), you can vote for and comment on each session.

Visit this "Session by Day" page on the Dreamforce site to get started.

INXS

INXS is playing the Dreamforce gala tonight. They opened with "New Sensation". High school dance anyone???

Dreamforce Keynote - Day 1

Dreamforce Day 1 keynote gets started as expected - U2 blaring, lights flashing, several thousand people milling around. Random bits follow:

Video clip of Marc's opening.

A bit of history and stats (see Jeff Grosse's great liveblogging at Jaiku for more specific details).

Platform and innovation big focus of keynote. And...

Force.com officially announced, "platform as a service" - to a round of applause.

Customer case study: Disney - using Force.com to manage character schedules (Where's Mickey today?) Salesforce built it in 96 hours versus Microsoft estimating 3000 hours.

Marc introducing customers: Jeff Hunter, Director Global Strategy and Tech at Electronic Arts. Jeff talks about EA's use of Force.com recruiting. They've recruited over 200 employees using this app.

Click below for more

Next up, The Bronx Lab School; Marc Sternberg, Principal (Benioff recognizes non-profits in the audience to a round of applause.)

Going to talk about PrincipalForce - 800 users, pilot system with 10 schools, going to grow to 30. Salesforce will give PrincipalForce to your school if you "like what you see".

Marc Sternberg provies a high-level overview of how PrincipalForce came to be with demo on big screen. Tracking students, attendence, performance, alerting parents, etc.

Talking about displaying any information on any device for any application - "what if force.com let you design any application with any interface".

Drum roll......

Visualforce - "user interface as a service"

Getting into how Visualforce works. Pu your code under any page. Salesforce has "componentized" the user interface. Components can be shared via the AppExchange.

Benioff introduces Parker Harris to demo Visualforce. Each page will have a "page editor" button at bottom of browser - that opens a window at bottom of browser (the look reminds me of FireBug). You can try out this during the conference.

Demoing page editing, sprinkled with another dig at Microsoft...

Example of insurance claim processing, looks nothing like the Salesforce.com UI you are used to.

Parker showing various devices and applications on them - Nokia OQO up first. Now an iPhone - they created a sample claims manager optimized for the iPhone. He runs through that - real time.

Free Force.com Cooking ebook is available at the developer lounge at the conference.

Marc introduces Jeremy Roche from Coda. Take enterprise level accounting application and offer to companies of any size - their product is "Code2Go". It is being built natively on Force.com

Keynote is now moving into the "Applications" portion.

George Hu, Salesforce.com Chief Marketing Officer now on stage.

5,000 ideas posted to IdeaExchange. He gives a nod to Alex Sutherland of CRM Manager for posting over 50 ideas on the IdeaExchange.

Talking about Winter '08 - 24th generation release.

Two new applications: Content Management and Innovation Management (covered briefly here).

Salesforce SFA Winter 08 highlights: Inline editing - round of applause. Customer Help Hovers and Tagging. Historical currency management, custom object translation, two new languages (Russian and Thai). Forecast delegation, Opportunity Roll-ups, Dynamic report Headers, Custom Report Types.

Salesforce for Marketing Winter '08 highlights: Campaign hierarchies, Campaign sharing, 16 new campaign reports.

George Hu introduces Phil Clement ("one of our best customers"), Chief Marketing Office at AON to talk about their success with Salesforce Marketing. Clement: "We want to know the value of every dollar spent on marketing".

George Hu now demoing some of the highlights listed above, including tagging, help hovers, custom report types, report headers.

Moving on to Winter '08 updates for Call Center and Customer Portal (formerly AppSpace). Highlights: Personalized Portals, Intelligent case escalation, rich content solutions.

Introducing Bill Karnazes, Qualcomm to talk about Service and Support (they are "one of our largest service and support customers")

Implemented Portal in one week with one person. They will be able to retire 40 servers and 11 databases.

Product demo for Call Center and Portal.

On to Salesforce Partner.

Now on stage, Doug David, Director of Sales Ops, Sprint.

Talking about their partner implementation. Took about a month and a half. Fully integrated with SFA.

George now demoing partner.

Updates to Salesforce mobile - George has ramped up the speed of his presentation - must be running behind. Back to Marc Benioff.

Marc will talk about two new applications, Content and Ideas.

Content: Share, tag, subscribe and rate all of your content in Salesforce. George Hu will demo ("one of my favorite demos of the day").

George is demoing Ideas.

Kevin Kettler, CTO of Dell now on stage to talk about Dell IdeaStorm. IdeaStorm was launched on February 16, 2007. 7,000+ ideas; 500,000+ promotions; 43,000+ comments. Top ideas was Linux on Dell - Delivered ubunto on Dell in 3 months.

Showing off new Dell tablet. Benioff wants one! Kettler gets his Apple crack in on his way off stage - got a good laugh.

Dell has also deployed Ideas internally for employee use (EmployeeStorm). They are also expanding it into more languages.

Marc Benioff wrapping up - 2.5 hour keynote! Whew!

Additional Coverage:
Jaiku: Dreamforce 2007 Channel
Salesforce Collective: Dreamforce 2007 - May The Force Be With You
Salesforce Collective: Dreamforce 2007 - Visual Force Announced
Between the Lines: Dreamforce: 07 Salesforce rolls out Visualforce

Dreamforce Press Releases are Flowing

I woke up to a flurry of Salesforce.com press releases in my inbox. A couple of note:

• Salesforce is expanding trust.salesforce.com to include security education and best practices. It is live here: http://trust.salesforce.com/security
• Updated stats on the AppExchange: 700th application live on the AppExchange; 34,000 application installs by more than 12,000 customers. Now over 100 industry-specific applications available; new vertical categories include: financial services, high tech and public sector. Check them out at the Industry Solutions Pavillion in the Expo Hall.
• Winter '08 announced. Two new application product lines featured: Salesforce Content and Salesforce Ideas. Salesforce Content leverages the Koral acquisition; Salesforce Ideas is based on CrispyNews. Both products will be available in limited release in Q4 of Salesforce's current fiscal year. General availability is slated for 2008. Promotional pricing for Salesforce Content is $25/user/month.

More releases are here.

Dreamforce '07 Kickoff

The first thing I noticed after entering the Moscone Center tonight to register is how much larger this year's show feels -- now, that could be the fact that many people won't be arriving until morning, but I don't think so. The second thing I noticed is how many partners are giving away iPhones. (Oh, and the third thing -- my camera bag is entirely too big.)

Sunday night at Dreamforce is always good for getting a lay of the land and setting up your plan of attack for the coming 3 days; so, I did a bit of both.

It was good to see some old faces and great to meet a few new ones! I managed to snap a few photos and push a few Twitter updates.

Tomorrow should be a big (and busy) day. Please stop me and say "Hi!", I would love to chat. I'll be wearing my Salesforcewatch.com shirt.