Perspectives on Salesforce.com

There are too many postings to count about App Exchange and what’s coming in the Winter release. Salesforce boiled down the Winter release key points for us in a recent posting on the CRM Success blog.

I am especially looking forward to the new Quote Management and Campaign Management capabilities mentioned there. Those will have the most immediate impact on my customers. Features such as the new UI will also be great attention-getter in selling customers on Salesforce. The current method for creating a campaign member list and associating it to a Campaign is very cumbersome. That and performing mass mail merges are the two things that are difficult to train and gets most people confused. I am excited to see how the Campaign enhancements turn out. Hopefully, the mass mail merges will come too! (hint hint).

With Dreamforce coming up, Salesforce is very likely to be announcing some big improvements to the software and new initiatives. I have not heard much, but am anxious to find out. Hopefully some of the improvements I recommended in other posts (ref 1, ref 2) will be implemented.

The only insight I’ve been able to find has been:

• A multiforce ERP solution (reference article). This might just be another partnership, but using the term “multiforce” leads me to believe this would be incorporated into the Salesforce.com UI. If so, I would hope it would also allow enhancements to it using customforce. Will this be part of an Enterprise license or a small addition to an Enterprise license? I have had projects where we struggled to determine how to complete the opportunity to cash process. Salesforce.com currently stops you at the opportunity, which is a weak form of quoting. A solid quote and order solution has been missing. I have long heard they use an Order and Invoicing solution internally (you can see it when you check your order and invoice history in the Company Information section of Setup).
• Salesforcewatch.com notes two possible somethings. The first is a reference from an employee blog and the second has something to do with “multiforce app packaging” (link). The post has a reference to an Sforce forum posting from Salesforce.com. It leads me to believe that they will be allowing developers to port their multiforce app configuration from one ORG to another. Hopefully, if it is something along those lines, it will allow for more granular porting of specific configurations (like a specific object or specific profiles) rather than the entire multiforce app.
• I have also heard that there will be some improvements to the Offline Edition and that it will support Leads in the next release, but I am not sure if its next release is the upcoming one.

Salesforce.com made a posting on the CRM Success website about changing the look and feel of the application for 2005. Their blog provides a forum for providing feedback on the design concepts.

Design 1 is my preference. I like the updated font, the updated graphics and the grey background to the page layout sections. Much more professional looking.