Perspectives on Salesforce.com

The Read/WriteWeb blog has a nice post about Software for Virtual Teams.

If you are looking for other on-demand type tools for your team/business, this is a nice list to start with.

Check it out

As Mark mentions, Salesforce has a landing page for the Spring ’07 release.

• Feature Detail Pages
• Admin Preview (PDF)
• Detailed Release Notes (PDF)

Of course, the landing page is your best place to start.

The Decoding Salesforce blog has a good post on working around the formula compile size limit. In short, it’s a way to span your large formula across 2 formulas and compile them in a particular sequence so Salesforce doesn’t realize its over its limit. Nice hacking!

I think this workaround may be needed less in the future, however. I am quite certain that the formula field compile size is getting increased to 5K with the Spring ’07 release.

Publisher: DrivEnable
Product: Draggin’ Role 1.0
Company Homepage
AppExchange Page

Michaelforce is a Salesforce administrator who has decided to create & share a new, free AppExchange application for administrators to use when managing roles. He is releasing it through DrivEnable.com. Per the listing:

Manage your role hierarchy with ease! Now you can drag and drop your way through any hierarchy modifications. Draggin’ Role is a free application that allows you to view and manipulate users AND roles from a single Custom Tab.

It is a handy utility to work with the role hierarchy, get the reporting relationships correct and associate users to it.

It uses the AJAX toolkit to do its work. You can see all the code he used to write it in your s-Controls and it could serve as a good AJAX toolkit example for you.

It’s worth a look. If nothing else, it should be a clear indicator that Salesforce needs to revamp the user experience in the Setup area. Especially when working in more complex/tedious areas to administer such as the Role Hierarchy, Forecast Hierarchy, Territory Management, Profiles, etc. It takes a lot of clicking to get anything done today.

An alternative to Draggin’ Role is OrgView by Dreamfactory.

The folks at 37 Signals have finally made their first official announcement regarding their new CRM application they have been building. They call it “Highrise” (previously known as Sunrise).

Over the next several weeks, they should be posting videos and other marketing materials about it. The depth of functionality in it remains to be seen. Based upon the description on their post, it sounds like it will be a basic Contact manager, as opposed to a complete CRM application. This is probably not much of a threat to Salesforce as a whole, but will likely be a viable option for single users and small teams that want to manage their contacts and manage activities related to them.

37 Signals has a tendency to release applications that people love to use (Basecamp for Project Management, Backpack for getting yourself organized, Backpack Calendar for calendaring, Campfire for chat), and they are leaders in the use of AJAX to enhance the user experience. Highrise will be an interesting application to check out. If nothing else, it should provide some user experience ideas to apply to Salesforce. Keep an eye on it.

You can sign up for their Highrise mailing list at http://www.highrisehq.com/.