Perspectives on Salesforce.com

Version 1.0.8 of Arrowpointe Maps was just released. You can read about all the improvements on the Change History page.

The biggest change is the addition of Routing functionality. The best way for you to get an understanding of it is to watch it on a screencast.

Other improvements include:

• International Routing is well supported. Results will vary country by country.
• The Star and Dot images were redone to be cleaner and more professional
• Added a form on the homepage allowing users to subscribe to Arrowpointe Maps related blog posts by email
• Other Usability, Performance & Security Enhancements

NOTE: If you are using Arrowpointe Maps and are confused by these posts about new versions, just know that these updates are happening automatically for you. You do not need to re-download the AppExchange application. Changes to the AppExchange package will be few and far between and those will be communicated very explicitly.

About Arrowpointe Maps

Arrowpointe Maps is an on-demand mapping platform that facilitates a conversation between Salesforce.com & MapQuest allowing for easy deployment of mapping capabilities in your organization and providing end-users a simple means for mapping their data. Arrowpointe Maps is configurable and can be tailored to your organization, so that your users can work with their information in a meaningful way.

The official location for information on Arrowpointe Maps is its product page at http://www.arrowpointe.com/maps. There, you will find answers to the most frequently asked questions, screencasts and links to its AppExchange page.

Newsgator just announced they are making all their consumer RSS apps free. If you are looking for a new way to follow RSS feeds, check them out. They are my preferred service. I would use Google Reader, but it doesn’t support secure feeds and doesn’t have all these nice options.

Some of the Newsgator service’s highlights (all this is free):

• No matter what client you use, everything is synced (feeds, read/unread status, saved items). This is key to it all for me.
• Support secure feeds
• Has a decent web interface
• Has a Desktop Windows App (FeedDemon). I use it every day and love it. Better than any reader of any kind that I’ve used. Why use the web interface when this is nicer looking than any web interface, is faster and syncs all your data with online.
• Has a Desktop Mac App (NetNewsWire). Mac users typically feel the same way about this app that I do about FeedDemon.
• Has a feed reading solution for MS Outlook
• Has a mobile web HTML interface
• Has a Java mobile app for Java enabled phones (e.g. Blackberry)

Just thought I’d pass it along to everyone as a good RSS option.

Salesforce posted the landing page for the Spring ’08 release. All information regarding the release including links to release notes, admin previews, implemented ideas, etc. can be found here.

http://www.salesforce.com/products/spring08.jsp

Did you know that you can add a + within your gmail address to automatically give yourself a new, unique email address that acts as an alias for your main address? Then, using Gmail’s filters, you can label/delete/forward those emails as needed. It’s a handy way to create a new unique email address on the fly without needing to go somewhere and actually create an account or explicitly setup an alias.

For example, the following email addresses will all go to myemail@gmail.com.

• myemail@gmail.com
• myemail+adn@gmail.com
• myemail+developer@gmail.com
• myemail+app1@gmail.com
• myemail+app2@gmail.com
• myemail+client1@gmail.com
• myemail+client2@gmail.com
• myemail+client3@gmail.com

This works for gMail as well as Google Apps for Your Domain.

The main reason I bring it up is that it’s a handy way to create new Salesforce usernames without needing to take an extra step and setup a new email address for yourself. Also, it’s a handy way to keep your email organized because you can use Gmail’s Filters to do so.

The Amazon.com’s Web Services team just announced SimpleDB. This is the newest of their many web services. This is essentially a database in the cloud and sounds very compelling.

What’s very cool about it is that Amazon is eliminating the need to manually manage a schema, allowing developers to manage it through their logic, while Amazon maintains the schema for you on the fly. For example, if you are creating a Customer record, you don’t need to define a City field that’s 50 characters in length and of type text. You just create your record with a bunch of attributes and it happens for you. Amazon will use the existing attribute if it’s used it before. If not, it will create those columns for you on your Customer object. It then indexes all of it for you for easy searching.

The pricing model is pay for what you use and, like their other web services, you have real-time visibility into what you are using and how much you owe them. All in all, it’s quite inexpensive for what you get.

I don’t see this service competing with Salesforce yet, but could compete with Salesforce (Force.com) as an infastructure platform for development in the future. Salesforce is a much more complete package with the UI components all there for you. Amazon’s web services are very raw (it’s just an API) and they rely on the business community to build tools that allow other businesses to develop on the platform. Initially, I see it competing with someone running a MySQL server on their domain. Amazon now has 3 very good web services for the developer: Amazon S3 for file/object storage, Amazon ECC for having virtual server(s), and now SimpleDB for storing more structured data. Using these, you could essentially eliminate a lot of what a web host does and use these services in the cloud and only pay for what you use. Very compelling in principle.

Where I feel that Salesforce could take a page out of Amazon’s book is the pay-for-what-you-use model. As a AppExchange application provider, I oftentimes need a back-end that is not the end customer’s Salesforce org. For example, with Arrowpointe Maps, I use the Salesforce org of the customer as the home for their business data and it’s nice I don’t need to store that anyplace else. However, I also have a MySQL database that houses a lot of the configuration information. I would love to use my Salesforce Org as this back-end. Everything is there for me to do it except that API rate limiting exists and I cannot risk having that limit hit if I am trying to service my customers. MySQL rocks for my purposes, but for future needs like this, I will be looking to Amazon SimpleDb as an option, but I would love to look to Salesforce for this.

Salesforce really needs a pricing scheme that supports an application using Salesforce as THE back-end database. This would be a model with unlimited (or pay-for-what-you-use) API access and a small number of web logins. The web logins would really be used to administer application data, build a schema, configure workflow, etc. 99% of activity would be via the API. It’s essentially the Platform Edition capabilities costed on an API basis rather than a user-basis and without any (or threats of) API rate limiting.