Perspectives on Salesforce.com

Tech Crunch, the definitive site for tracking “Web 2.0” technologies, has an article today about the newly announced “App Exchange Developer Network”. Salesforce.com is formally announcing the AppExchange Development Network today at the eTech conference.

The TechCrunch article talks about a mashup with Writely will be announced today. This will allow you to launch Writely to edit your Salesforce.com Documents and save them back to Salesforce.com automatically. Writely a very good online word processing / document collaboration website.

Salesforce.com just announced 2 new developer toolkits for PHP & Ruby on Rails.

Ruby on Rails project page.
Ruby on Rails quick start.
RoR toolkit is also a gem: % gem install activesalesforce

The PHP Toolkit is located here. It is included with very helpful documentation to get you started. From what I can tell, it has to be run on PHP5 because it relies on some SOAP extensions in PHP5. Does anyone know if there is a workaround for PHP4 for this toolkit? My ISP is still on PHP4.

I meet a lot of people who are very excited about Salesforce.com, but have let their 30-day trial expire before they can finish analyzing the product. Everyone should know that Salesforce.com offers Developer Edition accounts that never expire. You get nearly the same functionality as a 30-day trial (most Enterprise Edition functionality) except you are limited to 2 user licenses and and you don’t have access to the Online Training modules offered behind the Help link.

I would encourage anyone to sign up that is currently managing a Salesforce.com environment, responsible for analyzing the product as a potential customer or who is a developer that needs a playground environment. It’s a great tool to have at your disposal for a variety of reasons.

To sign up, you are joining the “Appexchange Developer Network”, which has some other benefits too (like the ability to post in the forums). Visit the sign up page for more info.

For more information on getting started with Salesforce.com, check out one of my first posts.

The Auto vCard functionality I created a while back is now public on the App Exchange. I encourage feedback on it and how it could be improved. Click the image below to visit the page on the App Exchange.

Thumbware.com has another integration between a popular web tool and Salesforce.com. First was del.icio.us and now gmail. Check it out at http://gmail.thumbware.com/