Patrick Shaw’s Weblog

Dreamforce was terrific - I haven’t been to a for profit conference before (I suppose that tells you something about my commitment to the nonprofit sector) so I was struck by both the size and the amount of goodies. Post meetings, there was great tasting snacks, there were a LOT of people there (about 9,000) and vendors were giving away nice things to attract customers, too.

Here’s part one - some notes about new features and partnerships:

• Facebook and Salesforce.com. This might sound like an odd partnership, although if I were the folks at LinkedIn, I’d be nervous. The long and short fo it goes like this: You can build applications in Salesforce that integrate seamlessly with Facebook. For instance, I might create a job posting in Salesforce, and using that integration with Facebook, evangelize that job description to my friends. And if any of them click on that link - they’ll be filling out the job application on Facebook - but it is really a window into my Salesorce account. The idea is that a business can begin to leverage social networking for things such as job opportunities and more.
• The 2nd big announcement was partnership with Amazon.com. Most of the nonprofit users we work with are using the CRM features of Salesforce to track donors, volunteers, clients and other items. What many don’t know is that Salesforce also offers a platform (called Force.com) which lets software developers use the Salesforce infrastructure to built applications that run on Salesforce servers (or as they would say "in the cloud"). The partnership with Amazon promises more of that, but with some twists. Amazon offers some similar services (they offer flexible storage and pay as you go computing power) - and the integration means that folks that don’t want to learn the Salesforce coding language can still use those services. For instance, I could use Salesforce to manage contacts, a PHP tool hosted on Amazon to manage a website, and Amazon to process payments.
• The final product announcement was Force.Com Sites - essentially, using the tools I mentioned above to create a website landing page from within Salesforce. It could have any visual design that you wish, but would be powered by your Salesforce data. I’m most excited by this element - some of my nonprofit customers may not need a deep content management system, and this might provide a very affordable solution for them.

Stay tuned for additional reports, including presentations by Larry Brilliant (google.org) and Malcolm Gladwell (author and NY Times writer).