Perspectives on Salesforce.com

Last night, I mentioned that NA2 was being setup. As of this morning, all of my accounts are being routed back to NA1. I spoke a little too soon that it was actually being setup last night. It must have been a temporary thing Salesforce was working on in the evening hours.

As was announced on the forums on 4/30, Salesforce is setting up additional logical servers (NA1 will be split out into NA1, NA2, NA3 and NA4).

There seems to be work being done at this moment. All of my Developer Edition accounts now route to NA2. NA2 is not up and running yet, but my Developer Edition logins are being routed that way. I am sure there will be an announcement from Salesforce soon as to what’s taken place.

My client’s accounts still route to their original servers (NA1, EMEA, etc.), so Salesforce seems to be taking it safe on who they move to that server today.

It would have been nice to have had some warning that these accounts would be routed to NA2 today. It’s been somewhat of a disruption this evening. Not a big deal, but it’s nice to know if an account is going down. Even if it’s only a free Developer Edition account.

I have had a chance to check out ConnectOnDemand (thanks to Mark for inviting me). It is a really nice idea and I appreciate Salesforce’s efforts in putting this together. As a consultant looking to gain exposure to a wider audience, I like the idea of having ConnectOnDemand as a tool to communicate with Salesforce customers, prospects and developers.

I cannot help but think of LinkedIn when I use ConnectOnDemand and there are a number of things that I really wish could be in this system that are in systems like LinkedIn and other similar tools. I am hoping that only a fraction of the functionality is exposed. Right now, you can do some searching, but there is no real way to connect with someone. I am assuming this is because the system is in beta right now and being deployed.

Below is a list of recommended improvements that spring to mind.

• Provide the ability to search by first and last name. I have no idea whether people I know are signed up.
• Ability to see first name, last name and company in the search results.
• Ability to add a person as a connection. I envision this being a request that can be made through the site. That person would receive an email with the request and could approve the request via a link in the email. Upon approval, you each would see each other in a “My People” list. You should be able to see the contact information of your connections.
• Ability to subscribe to the discussion groups and topics via RSS. Is this forum replacing the existing forums? If so, then I have a lot more recommendations since it doesn’t seem as robust as the current forums.
• Ability to create a custom group. For example, I might want to create one called “Independent consultants on the West Coast” and allow people to request joining the group. Like a Yahoo! Group of sorts. Within a group, you should be able to see members, connect directly with them and have discussion groups.

What are your suggestions?

I came upon a new site in my Salesforce.com RSS search. Does anyone know what this site is all about? It says it’s sponsored by Salesforce.com and is a networking site related to the Success On Demand events going on now. Is it like a LinkedIn for Salesforce.com users?

http://connectondemand.leveragesoftware.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.