CRM FYI

I put together a short highlights video of this year’s Dreamforce event in San Francisco. Thanks to other photo contributors Scott Barlow, Matt (mdmkd), Craig Villamor, Mike Leach, and Michael Krigsman for your additional great shots.

Marcelo Lewin, of the Pixel Heads Network recently posted an interview with Peter Coffee, platform evangelist for Salesforce.com.  Pixel Heads specializes in videos, blogs, and podcasts aimed at entertaining, informing, and teaching digital content authors.  

An interesting point Coffee brings up in the interview is the broad use of the term “platform” today.  He helps differentiate the requirements of scaling an application built on the Force.com platform versus on other platforms such as Facebook.  Some application developers are now finding out a kind of “cost of success.”  He says that while some Facebook application developers are happy to learn that their app is modestly popular, the Facebook platform is merely the gateway to their application and if they want to scale up to the masses, they’re facing increased hardware, bandwidth, and software costs to scale up their application.  The issue of scaling on Force.com is not an issue any Force.com developers need to worry about. 

To find out more about how Pixel Heads uses Salesforce.com and Amazon S3 for their network, you can catch it here.  There they talk about how the scaling of Amazon S3 allows them to serve their content worldwide to 10 or 10,000 people simultaneously without degraded performance or even any change made by Pixel Heads.  

It kind of goes back to the analogy of the power company.  I don’t have to worry about whether all my lights will go on in my house if I decide to illuminate them all at the same time.  The power company handles the load and I don’t need to call and request extra power, it’s just made available to me at a predetermined price.  

You can follow Pixel Heads at @PixelHeadsNet on Twitter  You can follow me at @CRMFYI on Twitter.

I found it interesting to read Bill Snyder of Computerworld put Salesforce.com CEO, Marc Benioff in what Snyder calls, “our Bozo Hall of Fame.”  He walks the reader through the drama that unfurled about a year ago when Salesforce.com began some type of talks with Zoho’s CEO, Sridhar Vembu about bringing the Zoho productivity suite to the Salesforce AppExchange.  Snyder attributes the “award” to Benioff for how the whole process went down and eventually fizzled to nothing.  What adds to the intrigue of this story is the timing of Salesforce’s strategic alliance with Google over the past year.  Though we don’t have many details from the article, here’s kind of what I’m kind of thinking went on.

Going back even a little further than this story recounts, I remember having a discussion with Salesforce back in 2006 about Zoho.  At the time, we had a Salesforce product manager and a few services guys in our office to discuss a project.  Off the cuff, I asked if the product manager had ever seen Zoho CRM.  Since he hadn’t seen it, I decided to take a few minutes and show him what I’d seen in it by getting a free Zoho CRM license.  We walked through the app a bit and honestly, we had a good laugh about just how similar Zoho and Salesforce really were, once you strip away the on-screen formatting.  While you can’t say that Zoho had nearly the features that Salesforce had at the time, it was still striking how much it appeared that Zoho emulated Salesforce CRM.  The Salesforce guys kind of laughed it off as imitation being the sincerest form of flattery.

We also found the Zoho CRM logo humorous.  Notice how the Zoho blocks are similar to the Salesforce “S Cube” logo which appears to now be retired.  And notice that the font of “CRM” appears to be strikingly like the signature logo of the company formerly known as Siebel.  What a coincidence?

Now fast forward to 2007.  The Google / Salesforce alliance gets it’s kickoff on June 5.  That alliance really started with Google Adwords and the launch of Salesforce Group Edition.  I’m going to guess that more than just AdWords talks had taken place during that year, though nothing more was released.  No doubt, talks about Google Apps were happening too 

Then, according to Snyder, sometime before Dreamforce 07, Salesforce asked Zoho to put development effort into integrating with Salesforce and offering it on the AppExchange.  Salesforce still had no office suite that was fully integrated to Salesforce CRM, so Zoho seemed to make sense.  Salesforce knew full-well that Zoho had a CRM product that would compete, but they wanted to see the office suite integration.  A later meeting between Salesforce and Zoho brought them to putting a stop to the offer to bring it to the AppExchange due to the competing CRM.  Salesforce then offered to buy Zoho out, though Zoho’s CEO refused.  Vembu wrote on the Zoho Blog on November 4 with the headline, “Mr. Benioff, Tear Down That Wall.”  Now if Zoho CRM had defined their company, I can see them being a little miffed at their flagship being absorbed (or annihilated) by a merger, but their many products defined Zoho, not just their CRM.  

Move forward to April 2008 and the launch of the full Google Apps suite, fully integrated with Salesforce.  That was a huge announcement which led to tons of possibilities and speculation.  While I know Google and Salesforce have become best pals, I wonder where that Google alliance would be today if Vembu had accepted Benioff’s offer to buyout Zoho.  Frankly, I’m glad Zoho walked away, but I wonder what Dreamforce 08 would have been like if Salesforce had it’s own office suite.

Though I can’t point to just when, I really thought I remember Marc Benioff being complimentary to Zoho in the past, on a quarterly earnings call when talk of office productivity suites came up.  Either way, now he gets to be complimentary to Google instead.

Regarding Snyder’s “Bozo” award, I can’t really say that I think it’s deserved.  Think of every corporate merger and buyout that happens.  If there are competing products in both the former companies, it’s not so unreasonable to expect the stronger one to win dominance and drive the other to obsolescence.  That’s business.  Not everyone will like it, but that’s the way it works.  Now he may be wishing that Salesforce had just let Zoho go out on the AppExchange as is.  But think about which one will drive more revenue to Salesforce.  Zoho on the AppExchange or Google Apps native in Salesforce? We know the answer, and that’s the way Marc Benioff has chosen to take his company.  Good for us.

I came across two interesting sites today.  Anyone who is interested in taking the certification exam on being a Salesforce administrator should check them out.  

The one site is ForceCertified.com where you can find some great information and exercises to get yourself prepared for the certification exam.  They’ve got many examples of concepts and topics that are tested on. 

ForceCertified then led me to the second site, called ProProfsQuizSchool where ForceCertified created a sample 15 question, timed sample exam to help you prepare.  Head on over and take the test.  If you’re an admin, see how prepared you might be.  If you’re not an admin, see how much you know about being an admin.  

Either way, consider getting certified.  Salesforce.com use is growing in all sectors of business, from small businesses to enterprises, to non-profits.  Getting certified helps validate your grasp of setting up and running Salesforce.  Of course a track record at your organization speaks volumes to your skills as well, but certification is worth having on your resume.  To find out more about getting certified, head on over to Salesforce and get your study guide, sample exam questions, or register to take an exam.

Salesforce has provided the Dreamforce 08 breakout sessions in record time this year.  Kudos to Erica Kuhl and her web services team at Salesforce tor getting them up so quickly.

Head on over to the Salesforce.com Community site and check out all the sessions you wanted to attend but couldn’t get to.  This year they have much better packaging of the content as the audio is synced to all the slides shown in the session.  Now you’ll see everything you would have gotten in the breakout (except for the speaker).

Didn’t attend Dreamforce 08?  No problem.  You don’t even have to log in to watch any of these great sessions.  Pick out your favorites and watch or even just listen while you’re doing your other work.  It’s a great way to get inspired and get more from Salesforce.

One of the key messages from Dreamforce 08 was the coming ability to build what are called Force.com Sites.  These sites are websites you can build to extend the reach of CRM and your own built apps on the Force.com platform to people who don’t use Salesforce.  This extends the your ability to gather data and build some great apps both on public websites and corporate portals that leverage your data and applications in Salesforce.

Monday night at Dreamforce, the Developer Community held a Hackathon where you got a hands-on look at Sites and a chance to compete for great prizes building your first site.  My good friend Johan built his first site and even won an iPod for the effort.  He built a site for employees to request access to Salesforce.  It could be integrated into a corporate portal and makes use of both the standard and custom fields on User records to not only allow users to request access, but you could even use workflow to auto-provision users and then assign a task to the Admin to give the profile a human-eye once over before activating it.  This fills a gap we’ve seen in how to get non-users of Salesforce on their way to accessing Salesforce.

I also had the chance to talk to a fellow passenger on my flight back to MSP about how he’s thinking of using Sites.  He manages franchise retail outlets around the country.  They use Salesforce to track much of the information the collect from those locations, but they don’t give each location access to Salesforce.  Today, they have to gather the data through email and manually input a lot of data.  His vision for Sites is to open a portal for those retail locations and allow them to enter the data directly to Salesforce, eliminating any double entry and really strengthening the process of data collection.  Tie that with workflow and you’ve saved a ton of time.

What have you thought about doing with Sites?  To this point, Salesforce and the Force.com platform have been pretty much a walled garden of your data, and of course much of it can and will stay that way.  But start thinking of what you could start managing through both internal and external uses of Sites.  Force.com Sites is currently in Developer Preview, but based on history, it’s probably not more than a few months from public availability.  To learn more about Force.com Sites, visit the Developer website and start imagining.  There’s also a webinar you can attend on December 2 to learn more about it.

Stop by the Immersion Lab upstairs to get your own copy of the Force.com Workbook. It’s a great book of 13 tutorials to build Force.com apps in just 30 minutes. Need it today or not, stop by and take one home. You’ll be amazed what you cab do.

The online version can be downloaded here.