Perspectives on Salesforce.com

Salesforce posted a new wiki page for a Flex Toolkit, allowing for rich interactive components to be built on Adobe’s Flex platform and integrated with Salesforce.com. The overview, per wiki page is:

The concept for this library is simple: Begin with the Salesforce AJAX toolkit, port the data layer to the ActionScript 3.0 programing language found in Adobe Flex, returning native strongly typed ActionScript objects for the Flex programmer to manipulate and render. This allows Flex programmers to build S-controls — components within the Apex interface where custom code can be executed — without dropping into JavaScript.

For more information:

• Visit the Flex Toolkit page on the Apex Wiki. There you will find Getting Started materials, downloads, object/class documentation, etc.
• Check out the screencast to learn about the IDE.
• See the end result in action in an AppExchange Test Drive

Last September, I posted about the usage stats for Auto vCard where I had about 1000 hits in August 2006.

Auto vCard usage continues to grow and is now being used by large companies in their Salesforce environments. The script received ~3500 hits in March 2007. Current stats below:

Auto vCard allows you to add a custom link to both Leads and Contacts and automatically create a vCard file from the record. These files will open into Outlook and other PIMs. In short, you click a link in Salesforce to save that contact/lead to Outlook.

• Get Auto vCard from the AppExchange. It’s free.
• View the Auto vCard product page on arrowpointe.com
• Read the Auto vCard privacy policy to learn about how your information is handled in this application.

As you probably heard, Salesforce announced the purchase Koral, a content management system, and unveiled a new product called the Salesforce Content Exchange.

You can read more about it on Salesforce’s site here and see a product demo here.

I was going to analyze it and do a write up on it, but I’ve been beaten to the punch. The Read/Write Web has a great post about it here.

A good article appeared on the Wiki yesterday. It’s called Mashups: The What and Why. It’s geared more towards someone not totally familiar with mashups and introduces them to things that are possible. It’d be a good place to point clients to in learning about the concept.

FYI – in case you didn’t know already, you can stay up to date on new Wiki pages via RSS.

A couple blogs to add to the blogroll:

• My Salesforce Blog : Salesforce developer focused blog by Joseph Ferraro, a Salesforce customer, developer, and admin for a corporate real estate firm based in Philadelphia. Welcome, Joseph!
• Enterprise Irregulars : A blog about Enterprise technology and its application to business in the 21st century. I think I am late in finding out about this one. I found it via Gareth’s recent post.