AppExchange

Faceforce; Social Networking Reaches Into the Enterprise

Posted on September 12, 2007 by Jeff Grosse in AppExchange, Integration, Marketing, Productivity, Sales, Social Networking | 25 Comments

Today, I got to look at what I first thought was an unlikely match of my two favorite platforms; Salesforce.com and Facebook. It’s called Faceforce and it augments your Lead, Contact, and Account data in Salesforce.com, helping you build deeper relationships with your customers and prospects.

When I first heard about this mashup, I wondered what value one would offer the other. I like both platforms and though I use both daily, I didn’t see how one would benefit the other. After seeing the apps work together, I understand more of the value and significance of this mashup.

How it works is you first need a login to Facebook. Then you install the Faceforce application into your Salesforce.com org from the AppExchange. You just need to add the S-controls created by Faceforce to your page layouts for Leads, Contacts, and Accounts. That’s literally no more than a two minute process for all three. Select the Faceforce application from AppExchange drop-down and click on the Faceforce tab.

The first time in, Faceforce will ask you to log into Facebook and add the Salesbook application to Facebook. This is the hook that allows the two apps to talk to each other. Once you’re back on Salesforce, you can Search for New Links to find people in your network that are found in Salesforce. Once you match up your contacts to their Facebook profiles, you’re ready to ready to update Salesforce. Before you do that though, if you have Salesforce contacts that you’d like to invite to Facebook, there’s a link to invite them into your Facebook network. Once you’re finished, you’re ready to see more about your contacts.

Now in Salesforce, if you look at a Contact that you’re friends with on Facebook, you can see their Facebook profile right inline with their Salesforce contact record. It even allows you to perform regular Facebook actions such as Send a Message, Send a Gift, Write on Wall, Message, view their Full Profile, and even the curious Poke.

At the Lead level, the S-control will search Facebook for the lead and show possible matches. If that is the person, you can link them to into the lead so you have access to all their Facebook data inline with your lead data.

At the Account level, the S-control will display all the Facebook connections you have with that company and allow you to take numerous Facebook actions, right from the Account record.

The mashup was built by Clara Shih, an AppExchange Product Manager at Salesforce.com in collaboration with Todd Perry, a software engineer at Facebook. She did it because she too is a huge fan of both platforms, but more importantly, she demonstrated a way of mashing up two products, that were never made for each other. Yet, as a user of both platforms, you can now connect the dots, having more information at your fingertips, inline with the applications you use everyday to build deeper relationships with your customers and prospects.

I don’t expect every company to adopt such a mashup, though the tremendous influx of new Facebook users 35 and older in the last months have certainly taken to the concept and are hungry to build their networks. If you’re looking for information on your customers and prospects, you can’t ignore what’s available through Facebook.

What Clara is doing with Faceforce is only going to spark more ideas of how to make use of data available to us. I’m interested to watch what she and others do to enhance this type of integration. We’re bound to see more like it.

I haven’t gone through nearly as many features as are in Faceforce. If you’d like to see a demo of Faceforce, Clara provides a short Flash demo of how Faceforce works. If you’d like to try Faceforce for yourself, you can install it from the AppExchange. Her next experiment will see what you can bring from Salesforce into Facebook. Kudos to Clara for helping us get a taste of the possibilities.

Technorati Tags: faceforce, salesforce.com, crm, facebook, mashup, salesbook, appexchange

Vertical Response Aims to Top the Charts

Posted on August 21, 2007 by Jeff Grosse in AppExchange, Marketing | Leave a comment

Direct email marketing AppExchange gurus, Vertical Response kick it again with their sophomore release of Nuthin’ But an App Thang. Furious Alf is joined by 2Fein and it looks like they’ve spent a bit more on the production this time. This is well-done viral marketing. The talent consists of Alf (Vertical Response Marketing Director) and Josh (Vertical Response Product Manager). Make sure to watch for Marc Benioff with the boys on the front page of Billboard.com in the video. I want to see these guys at Dreamforce and with the bling!

Check out their first release, VR for AppEx Baby.

Technorati Tags: vertical response, salesforce.com, email marketing

Salesforce Heads Cross Country On AIR

Posted on June 28, 2007 by Jeff Grosse in AppExchange, Dreamforce, Integration, Tools | Leave a comment

632338829_0c5c3a89cc Salesforce is co-sponsoring a cross country bus tour Adobe is subtitling “Cross Country Coding.” The On AIR tour consists of three months, eighteen US cities, a big red bus, and evangelism about Adobe AIR ((Adobe Integrated Runtime) formerly Apollo). It’s a little hard to see, but to the left of the O’Reilly decal is the Salesforce logo. You can see more pictures of the bus on Flickr. I’m registered already for the Minneapolis event in September which should prove pretty interesting.

Put simply, AIR is a way to develop applications that give a rich, user experiences both in a browser and on a desktop, across platforms. Developers don’t need to write different versions of their apps for Mac, PC, or Linux. They can develop once and deploy widely, even across browsers without worry of compatibility issues.

How’s that fit in with Salesforce? Salesforce has been working with Adobe to provide developer resources that let you make unique, richer Salesforce applications both through your browser with your Salesforce data, but also through desktop apps that don’t look anything like your browser. The Flex Toolkit for Apex is a storehouse of coding wizardry that extends your data in ways you could never work with your data before. Rich graphics, smooth transitions, drag and drop data, fields, and columns are just a few of the things Flex offers to Salesforce users. The Flex Toolkit works hand in hand with Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR to help create apps that may just blow your mind. Give it time, there aren’t many apps out there yet, but watch and see.

The only publicly available, free AppExchange application built with some Flex code that you can download and try right now is Conference Manager. Interestingly enough though, it’s also the app that Salesforce uses internally to manage Dreamforce. I’ve installed it and it’s slick stuff. It uses inline S-controls let you work with your data in a really unique way. Take it for a Test Drive or install it in your own development org.

If you want to get a taste of what AIR can do with your Salesforce data, check out Dave Carroll’s Salesforce Widget.

Adobe is putting a lot into the launch of AIR and from what I’ve seen so far, AIR has a good shot at making some compelling apps, and ways to see and work with your data unlike you do today. It looks like Salesforce is working very tightly with Adobe to make it that much easier for developers to work through Flex and AIR. Salesforce folks will be at numerous bus tour events showing off what they’ve done. Watch for the “coolness” of AIR both in standard Salesforce apps, widget like applications like Dave Carroll’s, and even in dashboards.

Between seeing what literally “develops” on the bus around America On AIR and what’s shown at Dreamforce 07, it looks like you’re going to be seeing Flex and AIR quite a lot before year-end. (And that’s a good thing.)

Technorati Tags: salesforce, adobe, air apollo, appexchange

The Google-Salesforce News You May Not Have Heard

Posted on June 7, 2007 by Jeff Grosse in Analytics, AppExchange, Customization, News | Leave a comment

June 5 has come and gone. The Google Salesforce alliance announcement that had been rumored and speculated about for weeks was made more clear. In a nutshell, Google and Salesforce teamed up to revamp the widely popular Team Edition of Salesforce as Salesforce Group Edition. What it means to the thousands of Team Edition customers is that they will now have an on-ramp to building their business through Google AdWords.

While much of the media is talking about that side of the June 5 Press Luncheon, I wanted to give you some highlights you may not have heard about. Some are quite significant and deserve more time.

Google.org was started with the same 1:1:1 model that the Salesforce Foundation began. Both companies give 1% time, 1% equity, and 1% product. Wise insight prior to either company going public made it possible to reserve hundreds of millions of dollars to be given away to organizations in need.

There are three companies that Marc Benioff has particularly high esteem for; Apple, Google, and Adobe. Apple has made elegence in design and utility. Google shares the same technology model of multi-tennancy, the availability of web services to empower applications, and an ease of use that makes it stand out against the competition. Adobe has long strived to make seamless interoperability between it’s sophisticated applicaitons and this is no better evident than in the new CS3 suite of graphic applications. Marc also pointed to the speed with which Adobe pulled the Macromedia applications into its core applications upon that acquisition. Adobe understands ingegration, workflow, and ease of use.

Google Gears will be the heart of Salesforce Offline in time. Google Gears makes offline interaction with web applications possible. This will make it possible for Salesforce to store data locally while offline, but sync effortlessly when connected, all with an enhanced user interface including AJAX.

Salesforce Group Edition was written as though Google and Salesforce were one. The start of this effort was designing the product as though they were one company. Taking the skill and expertise of both development teams, they made improvements that each would not have been able to make on their own. This is a unique partnereship that neither has done before.

Advances in the API are making a seamless developer experience. Synergies between Google and Salesforce APIs are making it possible to deliver new usable applications in a fraction of the time it used to take. Appirio is becoming the Salesforce “poster boys” for delivering applicaitons quickly. Incubator residents, they’ve been highlighted by Marc Benioff at Software 2007, the May 21 Developer Day, and at the June 5 Press Luncheon. Largely made up of software industry veterans, Appirio is driving enterprise adoption as an integration partner of Salesforce, and theiy’ve taken five products to market in record time, from ideas they heard about on the Idea Exchange. Through advancements in their API and Apex, Salesforce is making it possible for entrepreneurs to build their business on the web, with complex functionality, in a less time than ever.

During Marc’s presentation, he might not have said “enterprise” once. One analyst called Marc on this and it was interesting to see that the majority of the partnership is focused on small businesses, however, the more they learn from Google, it will surely trickle down into added functionality and usability on other editions than just Group. June 5 was really about small businesses.

June 5 was a big day for Salesforce and Google. It solidified that both companies are working together to make businesses wildly successful. They each have some expertise that will be compliment joint development over the next months and years. They also know they have a good thing going for them, working together. I can only imagine what they’ll have in store to announce at Dreamforce 07.

Technorati Tags: google, salesforce.com, adobe, apple, june 5, adwords, small business, group edition, google gears

If You Pitch It, They Will Fund….At Least Some Have – To the Tune of $225 Mil

Posted on May 21, 2007 by Jeff Grosse in AppExchange, Customization, Integration | Leave a comment

If you’ve watched the AppExchgange over the past 16 months, you’ve seen it grow from 150 initial applications to almost 600 today. And in that time, entrepreneurs and innovative thinkers have pitched some great applications, technologies, business practices, and concepts to venture capitalists. Some two dozen companies have already received more than $225 Mil USD in funding to develop for the AppExchange and propel them through this new age of on-demand services.

Today, Salesforce announced the formation of the AppExchange Venture Network to to bring together the people that are building the next generation of on-demand. The idea is to bring together the idea people, with the funding people, with the channel people to accelerate the growth of applications on the Salesforce platform.

It’s also the literal incubator that will most likely lead Salesforce to its next acquisition. Since Salesforce will be at the heart of forming this community, they’ll get a chance to not only be blown away by the ideas and developments of these entrepreneurs, but gauge the reactions of VCs and the market to these products and services. Koral had little more than a concept to deliver, but that was enough to grab the attention of Salesforce and not let an on-demand content management system slip away.

Who benefits from all this? Salesforce does since they’ll gain revenue from customers who want these goods. Entrepreneurs do as they get a chance to show off their ideas and get funding to deliver their products. VCs do as they get to focus tightly on products that accelerate on-demand. And lastly, Salesforce customers do as they’ll get deeper, richer, applications that help drive their business forward.

Marc Benioff’s dream of 10,000 applications on the AppExchange might not be so far fetched. The question then will be, which of 15 ways do you want to solve that business problem you initially went to the AppExchange for?

Technorati Tags: appexchange, marc benioff, salesforce.com, venture capital, koral, venture network, on demand