CRM FYI

Though the Global Gala entertainment at Dreamforce was reported to be Barenaked Ladies, it’s been changed to Foo Fighters.  Either way, the Gala will be a lot of fun.

Technorati Tags: salesforce.com, dreamforce

Thanks to Eric for pointing out to me that yesterday, July 26, 2007 was the day Salesforce crossed the 100 million transaction mark in a single day.  That’s a pretty significant number and it will soon be the norm for a weekday total.  It looks as though transaction performance isn’t hurting because of it either. 

Quick Math:  100,072,460 transactions per day = 115.82 every second

On May 14, I originally predicted it would happen August 29.  Spikes in transactions led me to modify that prediction on June 14 to guess the end of June or beginning of July. 

What have I learned from this?  I’m not too good at predicting, although I did get one thing right.  It did happen before Dreamforce. 

Technorati Tags: salesforce.com, trust, performance,

Can you imagine how many mouse clicks you can save by being able to edit Salesforce data inline; without hitting the  button and refreshing the screen so many times?

Inline data editing has long been a desire of a huge number of users.  It adds convenience, saves time, and look at the features they’ve thought of already in their prototype that some of us might not have thought of.

As you roll your mouse over the detail page of a record, you’ll see the background change and icons appear that indicate whether that field is editable or read only.  As you click on an editable field, it highlights the test already there.  (You don’t have to backspace over it)  If it’s a lookup field, the lookup magnifying glass is right there, ready to help you search for it.  And there’s an Undo button so you can back up if you accidentally input bad data or erased the previous value. 

Once you leave a field you’ve edited, the field value changes color to indicate your changes have not yet been saved in Salesforce.  One click on the Undo button on any of those changed fields returns the original value of the field.

When you’re done editing all the fields, hit the Save button.  If you try and navigate away from the record before hitting Save, you are alerted with a message that your changes have not yet been saved and asks if you really want to leave that page. 

That’s a high level overview of this new prototyped feature.  Personally, I had no idea they were this far in developing it.  I’m thrilled to see it though and I encourage everyone to go out and try the prototype.  Does it do what you expected it to do?  How does your experience with any other web applications with inline data editing compare?   Are there any missing features you’d like to see in it?  The place to put all these comments is on the User Experience blog.  They’re asking for our ideas, give ‘em all you’ve got.

Technorati Tags: usability testing, salesforce.com, crm, inline editing

Until today, we hadn’t heard too much about the keynote speakers and entertainment at Dreamforce, but it was revealed on Facebook today.

Exciting keynotes by George Lucas, John Chambers, Marc Benioff, and many others.

Great entertainment by Seattle’s Own FooFighters! Let’s rock.!

(Originally, this was announced as Barenaked Ladies being the entertainment, however, it’s now been updated to the Foo Fighters.)

Technorati Tags: dreamforce 07, events, salesforce.com, crm

Just when I thought the new Date Picker in Salesforce.com Summer 07 was super convenient, I learned of the shortcuts they put in.  Nice!

Now when you click on a date field, you can type shortcuts to auto-fill the date.  See some of these examples.

Examples
mm-dd = that month and day, this year
mm/dd = that month and day, this year
mm.dd = that month and day, this year
yes = yesterday
tod = today
tom = tomorrow
sun = next Sunday
mon = next Monday
tue = next Tuesday
etc.

Non-English (US) locale users, unfortunately, this shortcut feature is not in yet for your locale, but here is your chance to vote for it on Idea Exchange and make it happen sooner. 

Technorati Tags: salesforce.com, dojo, ajax, summer 07, crm, calendar

Though I am one who lusts after an iPhone, I’m not one who will run out and get one anytime soon.  Author and blogger, Paul Greenberg has opened up a little competition or bakeoff when it comes to CRM apps running on an iPhone.

He’s inviting EBSuite, Etelos, HEAP, NetSuite, and Salesforce.com to show off their apps on the iPhone and see who’s best.  This should be an interesting one to watch, provided everybody is up for the comparison.  While Greenberg says Zoho has come up with a great suite of desktop productivity apps for the iPhone, he says they haven’t put anything together yet for ZohoCRM.  (If you haven’t seen ZohoCRM, it’s amazingly similar to Salesforce.  So much so that Salesforce thinks it’s flattering.  Zoho lacks quite a lot compared to Salesforce, but it’s funny to look at how much they look alike.)

Having just watched some more video on the Adobe on AIR Bus tour today, I’m thinking that Salesforce would probably be able to make some pretty killer apps for iPhone using the Flex Toolkit.  But then again, this is Salesforce, so why would the vendor need to build the app.  Incubators?  Anybody up for the challenge?  With Dreamforce only eight weeks away, who will be showing off Salesforce on the iPhone? 

I’m sure the geekdom (I say that lovingly guys) of Salesforce HQ and the Incubator have plenty of iPhones floating around.  If you are using Salesforce on the iPhone, send me a screenshot of it.  Tell me what you think of it.  If you’re working on an app for the iPhone, let me know about it.  I’d like to hear what you’ve done, and most of all, I’d like to see it at Dreamforce.  Actually, it doesn’t matter who you are….tell me what Salesforce is like on your iPhone.

In the meantime, let’s watch how the competition heats up over at Paul’s blog and see who shows up for the party.

Technorati Tags: crm, salesforce.com, iphone, ebsuite, etelos, heap, netsuite

Marc Benioff commented recently on some of the details announced about pricing of Microsoft’s delve into hosted, on-demand CRM software, CRM Live. 

Microsoft announced that they will begin beta this fall with a Professional Edition and Enterprise Edition of CRM Live, available through the web or Outlook.  Pricing for PE and EE are $44 and $59 per user, per month respecitvely.  That’s lower than Salesforce, but why?

Marc Benioff says, “When you have an inferior product you have to have an inferior price. That is why Zune is priced below iPod. And why Windows CE is priced below BlackBerry. And why Microsoft CRM is priced below Salesforce.com.”

It’s my humble opinion that there’s a lot of truth to that.  I was a part of the RFP process when evaluating Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics CRM.  The Microsoft partner pulled out citing too complex requirements….Salesforce didn’t pull out though. 

The question on many people’s minds is will Microsoft get to the point where they have the same features that Salesforce has today?  I’d say there’s a pretty good chance they’ll get there someday.  But by that time, Salesforce will significantly farther ahead.  Salesforce is innovating constantly and responding to what the users want. 

And just going on past experience, what was the last product that Microsoft put out that had three major releases in one calendar year?  If you think of one, please email me.

Technorati Tags: microsoft, crm live, salesforce.com,

It’s great when something that secretly annoys you is fixed, eliminated, or otherwise changed into something much better.  That’s the way I feel about the new date picker coming out with the Summer 07 release of Salesforce next month. 

It used to be that to pick a date on a date field, you had to click a button which launched a new browser window to pick the date you want.  That will soon be no longer.

With Summer 07, you just click the date field and very quickly, right in place, on your same window, there’s a calendar for you to pick the date, and it is fast.  Try clicking on the next and previous months and it keeps right up with you as fast as you can click.  No more waiting for the window to refresh with another month.  Even better, there’s a month dropdown as well as a year dropdown to quickly navigate to the exact month and year you want.

Kudos to the UI team that knew we were secretly annoyed by that old, archaic way. 

Technorati Tags: salesforce.com, summer 07, calendar, next generation

In one of the poorest productions of video that I’ve seen in awhile, A list blogger, Steve Gillmor put together some interviews he recorded at Software 2007, Web 2.0 Conference, some Salesforce function, and more. 

Fortunate for you, the walk into HQ is in the first 3 minutes of the video.  He’s on his way to see Marc Benioff who appears to be doing a phone interview at the time.  I like the Yoda on Marc’s desk.  In another bit of useless trivia, this video contains three different versions of Marc; full beard, clean shaven, and half-way.

If you should choose to watch more, the other people you’ll see him talk to include Robert Scoble, Dan Farber, and Doc Searls.  At one point, Dan Farber tries to turn the camera on Steve Gillmor and interview him too, though he’s unsuccessful. 

The whole podcast is a bit of a “Benioff sandwich” that starts and ends with Marc.  About 34 minutes into the video, we come back to Marc’s and hear his opinion on the iPhone. 

OK, bottom line, it has some funny moments, but be sure to multi-task if you choose to take in the whole show.  There are no refunds on these 38 minutes of your life.  

Technorati Tags: steve gillmor, marc benioff, salesforce.com, bad sinatra

UPDATE:  NA2 and NA3 are being upgraded August 10 from 8 PM PDT until 1 AM.  Thank you Lisa and Darcy for the info.

I got notice recently that my org of Salesforce, NA1, will be upgraded to the new Summer 07 release on August 3, from 8 PM PDT until 1 AM. 

If you haven’t seen what’s coming yet in this release, here are some great resources to check out.

Overview
Feature details
Admin Preview (pdf)
Detailed Release Notes (pdf)

One of the greatest features Salesforce has added to the Release Notes is the Summary of Features and Impact on Salesforce users that you can find on page 3 (literal page 5).  This helps administrators map out what change this upgrade will have on their users the next time they log in after the upgrade.  Be sure to check that out.  And to Salesforce, thank you very much for adding that feature in Spring 07!

I have accounts on NA2, NA3, and NA4 so when I hear about them being upgraded, I’ll let you know as well, but if you get word on any other dates first, please drop me an email.

Technorati Tags: salesforce.com, summer 07, upgrade