Perspectives on Salesforce.com

In the most recent Inside the Net podcast episode, there was an interview with Jeff Fried of 37Signals, makers of Basecamp, Backpack and Ruby on Rails. In the interview, Jeff mentions that they will be releasing a CRM product (called Sunrise) in the first half of 2006, which will likely be geared towards the small business market. 37Signals products have a strong user-experience focus and it will be interesting to see their take on CRM, the UI to support it and the impact this product will have on small business CRM purchasing decisions.

I just wanted to point out some of the features on this blog that you can use to gather more Salesforce related information. You can access most of it by walking down the sidebar.

• About This Blog: Page explaining the purpose of the blog and how you can register to contribute content. Please do!
• del.icio.us links: As I come across postings and articles that are Salesforce developer related, I bookmark them on del.icio.us. I pull this list onto a page. There is an RSS feed for the list at the bottom of that page if you are interested in getting the updates to it. If you subscribe to the Salesforce blogs in the Blogroll section further down on the sidebar, then you probably don’t need to subscribe to the del.icio.us links.
• Incoming Links: I am using technorati to list other pages that are linking to my blog. If you are really looking for new sources of information, you might want to drill down into those links and see if the referring site is of interest to you.
• Blogroll: This is a list of the most relevant Salesforce related blogs/feeds I am aware of. Please let me know of others.
• Category Subscription: This is not in the sidebar. You can also subscribe to a specific category on the blog if you’d rather not receive all of the posts from the main feed. You could have done this before by manually adding “/feed” to the end of the URL when looking at a category. To make it easier, I added an image to the page when looking at a category to allow you to subscribe to just that category.

Open Access has created an ODBC driver for Salesforce. This allows you to use any ODBC compliant software to access the Salesforce database. You can get a free 30 day trial on their site. I have been playing around with it the past couple days to see how it worked for me in migrating data from one Salesforce environment to another. So for so good. The price seems pretty reasonable too, $99/year for a single user license.

There is also a free option to does pretty much the same thing at Sourceforge. The Forceamp tool allows you to create a Linked Server in SQL Server to your Salesforce instance(s). That tool is free, but requires SQL Server. If you don’t have SQL Server, you can get SQL Server Express free from Microsoft.

The sforce project on sourceforge has an RSS feed for new/updated files. This can help you keep track of the latest and greatest source code.

I came across a cool web service called Tagcloud. The site creates a tag cloud of keywords based upon whatever RSS feeds you give it. I decided to create a Tag Cloud that included some Salesforce blogs: mine, Salesforcewatch.com, Successforce and the Sforce blog.

The permalink to the tag cloud is http://www.tagcloud.com/cloud/html/Salesforce/default/50

To change the number of tags displayed, just change the number at the end of the URL (currently 50 tags are shown).

Since most rss feeds do not contain a full history of posts, the cloud is only made up of the posts in the current feed.