This week I had a chance to write a guest blog post for the Salesforce AppExchange. I chose to write about utilizing networks to become a hero to your Salesforce users.

It’s not hard, it really doesn’t take that much time, and in the beginning, you can even start out by just listening in. No matter your experience level with Salesforce, you’ll gain a lot, just by listening on on some of the channels I mention.

Have a look and I welcome your feedback either here or on the AppExchange blog.

With a network, you don’t need to have all the answers to be a hero to your users.

Amid all the hoopla around Google Buzz, Salesforce is making some buzz themselves in the Enterprise space with the announcement of a Chatter private beta to 100 customers today.

When Salesforce began looking for customers to start kicking the tires on Chatter, the response was overwhelming. More than 2,500 companies enthusiastically volunteered for the beta. From that, 100 were chosen across many industries including financial services, manufacturing, high tech, and professional services.

So what really is Chatter? Well, if you’re one of the 400 million people who have joined Facebook already, you already have a little familiarity with what it’s about. Chatter is streams of information, files, comments, photos, snippets, videos, data, and intelligence, fed to you directly in context of where you already work. Chatter takes the work out of finding this information and instead puts it in front of you, knowing what you need to know about and letting you customize and filter your feeds to be most relevant.

Chatter is the culmination of numerous business functions that we can all benefit from. It’s part content management system, part team report card, part data field history viewer, part chat client, part message board, part workflow notifier, and part get-to-know-the-people-you-work-with social network. It makes data come alive, whether that’s letting you know an important deal just closed, a new product catalog was published, a competitor just had a bad earnings call, your co-worker needs help with their presentation, or one of your customers is late in paying an invoice to you. Chatter brings all that together in one place so you can make better decisions, help others on your team, and easily publish news with just a few clicks

Much of the information you’ll get in Chatter is timely and important, so Salesforce needed to find a way to provide you that information even when you don’t have your browser open with Salesforce. That’s why along with Chatter, they’re introducing a new Chatter client for the desktop that is built on Adobe Air. Much the same way TweetDeck provides you background popups with relevant tweets you decide you want to know about, Chatter will provide you that immediate feedback on your computer, regardless of what application you’re running and what’s in the foreground. Since this Chatter client runs on Adobe Air, it works on both Mac and PC using the same code.

When you’re away from the desktop, you don’t have to miss out on Chatter there either. Chatter will include dedicated iPhone and BlackBerry apps right out of the chute. No more hauling out the laptop to see what your team has been doing to move deals forward. Information is served to you in real time. No waiting for an email that a deal closed, just follow it on Chatter and you’ll know.

Among the biggest benefits of Chatter is the fact that it’s built on a solid, secure infrastructure that you don’t need to worry about. Just know it’s there, it’s secure, it’s scalable, and it’s out of sight. You won’t pay for a server upgrade, you won’t patch a database, you won’t buy a firewall, you won’t add a hard drive, you won’t have to do load balancing, you won’t have to tweak a kernel, you just go about your work and leave the rest to Salesforce. And because Chatter is just an extension of the applications you’ve already setup, all the data security that’s already in place just works, out of the box for Chatter.

It’s almost like Chatter is putting a human side on CRM. Today, we converse in the halls, in meetings, on the phone, and through email, but we don’t exchange more than limited amounts of data about ourselves, the projects we’re working on, the deals we’re closing, or the scoop we learned. We occasionally share information using Salesforce itself, but we rarely see the data come to life. Chatter brings the insights to you. Even the fact that all users of Salesforce will have a profile page which can contain a photo, bio, stream of what they’re doing, the groups they are members of, the documents they update, and the people who they follow tells immensely more than just passing in the hall or during a meeting.

As Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce pointed out back in November, with Facebook, I can know what movie my friends have been gone to, but I don’t have just as easy access to what deals that same person is moving forward in my pipeline. It doesn’t have to be that way. Chatter will offer prescribed and subscribed content to keep you in-the-know about anything in Salesforce.

I can see it now. Chatter streams will eventually become the topic of conversation throughout the halls of companies around the globe. Have you noticed how often Facebook and Twitter are mentioned in the news, television shows, and even in the lunch room? When people begin seeing the value of sharing, collaborating, informing, assisting, building, and  broadcasting, in context, it will change the way we work.

The private beta is a great sign of progress and getting Chatter ready for prime-time. Remember, Salesforce unveiled the concept of Chatter only three months ago at Dreamforce 09. It’s anticipated that Chatter will be available for all Salesforce customers during 2010. While it’s an aggressive timeline to go from 100 customers on Chatter to nearly 70,000 by the end of 2010, that go-live will be a pivotal moment in enterprise computing. It will set the standard by which other collaboration tools will be judged. And while it will be a new concept for it’s users, it’s also going to feel like something they already know. There won’t have to be a day-long class to teach users how to use Chatter. It will come quite naturally, and when it does, watch what will happen in companies; as their data comes alive, reps are enabled, managers are informed, and the company hub becomes Salesforce and Chatter.

To learn more about Chatter, attend the live Chatter event today (February 17) at 12 PM PST.

Staples may have the corner on that “Easy button” thing, but Salesforce now has an “Easy box.” It’s called Setup Enhancer for Salesforce and it’s about to make navigating the Setup tree a whole lot easier.

Setup Enhancer for Salesforce is a Greasemonkey script that helps you find just what you’re looking for in Setup with a minimal number of keystrokes. Looking for Account Validation Rules? Don’t hit all those plus signs out there and scroll down endlessly. Type “val” and you’ll have one list of just validation rules. To learn more, check out the video.

All you need to run Setup Enhancer for Salesforce is

• Firefox 3.5 or greater
• Greasemonkey
• Setup Enhancer for Salesforce

This is the Salesforce administrator’s new best friend. If you try it and like it, please leave a five-star review of it at UserScripts and leave some feedback.

It’s kind of scary, but I think he really did. I was just drafting an email to my favorite User Experience team at Salesforce. I wanted  to discuss any future ideas they had on revamping the interface to allow “gradual data entry” and not just overwhelm people with a huge page layout with temporally superfluous fields on it.

When I heard that Salesforce had released a new feature set called Visual Process Manager (VPM), I first thought it was a rehash of the previously released visual approval process designer. While a good product, it wasn’t the most exciting thing around. (No offense to those who wrote it. Showing the process visually is WAAAY better than just looking at a series of steps.)

As it turns out though, Visual Process Manager was actually the first step in Salesforce breaking open the piggy bank to acquire some new companies to compliment their current functionality and expand way beyond what many of us are even dreaming about.

Salesforce acquired Informavores, a six year old company in the UK who specializes in simplifying process management. Co-founded by Steve Wood and Robert Suttie, they’ve been AppExchange partners with Salesforce since 2009.

The core of VPM is (the formerly known product) Firefly; a sophisticated yet simple to use, drag and drop interface that you can design process flows in minutes, not days. Test them out, on the fly. Then after they’ve been in place for awhile, measure which paths are taken most often; which ones are never used at all. Learn how you can tweak the process to make it smoother for everyone.

Fortunately, some of Informavore’s customers like British Telecom (BT) are already on Salesforce.com for CRM. While Firefly was originally designed to work with nearly any CRM solution, I’m willing to bet in the very near future, they’re moving to just one; Salesforce.

What gets me most excited about VPM is the idea that some data is gathered in sequence and the user doesn’t need to see 80 fields on a page, just to fill out the 20 which turn out to be relevant to their particular issue or inquiry. That’s where VPM’s call scripting comes in.

Using VPM to design a call script allows you to gather relevant data when you need it and help guide sales and support people down the right avenue to not only ensure better data quality, but gather the right data every time and ensure that mandatory paths were taken and so on.

I’ve already got in mind a project that I want to start building on VPM tomorrow. I have a team of sales people who sell Medicare insurance to the public. There are strict regulations around the exact scripts which much be read to members when they’re enrolling in Medicare. VPM will allow me to design all those paths (98 pages on paper) and ensure we not only gather exactly the data necessary to enroll those members, but will ensure that we read them each part of that script and record their response to the whole enrollment process. in “the old” Salesforce, I couldn’t do anything that complex without a customized solution like using Flex Builder for Force.com. Now rather than needing developers, business users can design and deploy complex business processes on their own and adjust as quickly as their business changes.

Do you have business processes which require this kind of scripting? Maybe it isn’t 98 pages like my Medicare model above, but maybe you need to gather relevant data step by step and the “old way” in Salesforce just hasn’t given you the results you need from a data quality or employee guidance standpoint. You should check out VPM.

I’m sure we’ll see a lot more about this in the coming months, but for now, Marc read my mind and has spent his first however many millions of dollars from the piggy bank wisely on acquiring Informavores.  This is a great step forward and I’ll let you know how it goes building my first scripts.

See an overview of Visual Process Manager

salesforce.com: Visual Process Manager Demo

Posted to The Salesforce Channel by CRMFYI on February 02, 2010

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See what Firefly for Salesforce can do (Informavores demo)

See an overview of Firefly for Salesforce and Force.com (Informavores demo)

On my calendar, Friday, August 27, 2010 has had a special inscription on it for the past year and a half. It’s a date that could change the world I work in. It could be the day by which Software as a Service (SaaS) all out collapses and Salesforce.com, it’s poster-child, goes under. Well, that could be the case if the words of Harry Debes, the CEO of Lawson Software were to come true in the next 212 days.

It was August 27, 2008 when an interview with Debes was published by ZDNet Asia. Reading the story caused me to do a double take at least four times to see if what I was reading was really what he said. As a man who has made his living in enterprise software for many years, Debes was reassuring his shareholders, board, and customers that this SaaS thing was really just a reincarnation of the Service Bureau and ASP model; that they really didn’t need to take notice of this SaaS stuff as it would be just a flash in the pan and gone within two years. That made me go to my Google Calendar and mark August 27, 2010 as the day I’d have to see if Debes was right.

My Calendar

While that interview and a subsequent one from 2009 reiterate Debes’ position that SaaS is not profitable, he won’t take his company that way, and it only has a one-trick-pony, Salesforce.com, it would appear that the appetite for SaaS is growing tremendously; significantly more than that of the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) space that Lawson lives in.  (Lawson itself had to issue guidance of earnings below estimates, 6 out of the past 7 quarters) (In that same period, Salesforce issued guidance below estimates once, in-line with estimates 3 times, and above estimates twice)

Revenue and customer count for Lawson have been flat the past 18 months at about $800 million and 4,500 respectively. By contrast, Salesforce has increased revenue 20% ($1.07 billion to $1.29 billion) and customer count by 42% (47,700 to 67,900) in the same period.  I read those numbers and the recent growth of Salesforce.com and SaaS as indicators that the market is gravitating towards solutions that require less time to implement, less people to maintain, and are much more nimble to the changing business environment than the traditional software solutions previously available.

Another key to the growth of Salesforce has been the complete delivery of four major releases in the past 18 months to every customer. In that same time, if a traditional enterprise application even saw one release, it would be amazing; let alone surprising if anyone had the time, people or budget to plan a project around implementing that new release. With Salesforce, the customer pays nothing for the upgrade and continually gets additional features with every release; talk about value!

So where does that leave us at the beginning of 2010? Judging from current trends, it looks like the SaaS is flourishing pretty well and Salesforce.com in particular is going to make 2010 a very interesting year, especially with it’s $1.5 billion piggy bank, ready to hit the acquisition trail.  Just what they’ll buy is really anyone’s guess, but so far, each acquisition they’ve made has been integrated to their core product rather quickly and added differentiating power to their application lineup.

Myself, having worked for an enterprise software company for 11+ years and quite a few mergers and acquisitions, the product fit, and speed to integrate with existing product lines is really important. I saw some very good products die on the vine just because they were acquired and not properly integrated to the core product competencies of the company. By contrast, with the acquisition of Instranet, Salesforce has even proven that you can take a previously on-premise application and re-architect it for SaaS in a relatively short amount of time.

Where do you think the market will take SaaS this year? If you missed it, I recommend you take a listen to the replay of Appirio’s Forecasting Fisticuffs, a great roundup of some great minds in Cloud Computing. Hear what Dennis Howlett, Vinnie Mirchandani, Phil Wainewright, Narinder Singh, and the referee Ryan Nichols think will happen in this and coming years. (For an interesting commentary on each of the points Debes made against SaaS in the ZDNet article, it’s worth reading Ryan Nichols’ response) These are heavyweights in the Cloud and offer a great deal of insight and entertainment about what’s to come.

As to my original question of whether we only have 212 more days until the collapse of SaaS, I guess we’ll have to wait until August 27 rolls around for sure, but if I had to place a bet, I think I’d put it in the cloud.  The market is evolving, but in a way that’s advantageous to the cloud and its customers. That’s what I see. And as for the demise of Salesforce, I don’t think 2010 is the year for that. Continued good news, innovation, expanded product offerings, increased reliability, and vision have me believing that 2010 will be a stellar year for Salesforce.

The bags are almost packed.  I’m nearly ready to go.  Before I pack up the laptop for the trip, I thought I’d pass along some info on where I’ll be and what I’ll be doing at Dreamforce, just in case you’d like to find me among our newest 15,000+ friends.

New Attendee Orientation

Tuesday night at 5 PM in N134 is the New Attendee Orientation led by Tom Wong.  I’m going to be giving a few tips to the new attendees there and if you haven’t been to Dreamforce before, you really should plan to attend this session.  I’m not saying you should attend on account of me, it’s all the other stuff you’ll get out of it that I guarantee will be worth the effort to be there.

The Dreamforce TweetUp

Held in the Expo Tuesday at 6 PM, there will be a meeting of a whole bunch of Twitterers who have never seen each other in person before.  I’m excited because though I’ve been on Twitter for more than 2 years, it’s only in the last year that I’ve found it to be an invaluable business resource.  Yes, I said a business resource.  Come find out why Twitter is home to slew of activity about the Salesforce community.  If you don’t use or understand Twitter, stop by and see why you should consider trying it out.

Wednesday AM Keynote

Without a doubt, this is the keynote everyone goes to see.  I’ll be seated in the Press/Blogger section, madly Tweeting away.

“Increasing Speed to Value with the AppExchange”

Wednesday evening at 6 PM, I’ll be in the Campground Theater giving a half hour talk / Q&A about AppExchange apps that give some great value at no or low cost.

Speakeasy in the Cloud

My blog sponsor, Appirio, is pretty well known for the parties that they’ve thrown at the last few Dreamforce events and this year will be no exception to that.  This year, it’s being held at the Old San Francisco Mint.  If you don’t have an invitation to this event, there’s a waiting list you can add yourself to.

Birds of a Feather

Thursday at lunchtime, I’ll be found in the Insurance Industry area of the lunch room, specifically meeting with other Blue Cross Blue Shield affiliates who use Salesforce.  I’m really looking forward to meeting those folks.

Cloud Crawl

Salesforce threw a mighty fine gig at Temple nightclub last year and once again, I’m going back.  This one is Thursday night and will likely be a pretty late night.

“There’s an App for That; Boost Sales with the AppExchange”

This is a Sales track breakout session Friday at 9:00 that I’ll be on a panel for.  I’m sharing the stage with some great sales people who have found some incredible value from the AppExchange apps they use.  Come find out what those apps are.

Between all that stuff, I’ll be attending breakout sessions, stopping by as many of the Expo exhibitor booths as I can and hitting some other parties from great companies like Model Metrics, Informatica, Reside, InsideView, Genius, and others.  To add more content to the blog in the coming weeks and months, I’ve got numerous interviews planned with some interesting executives.  You’ll hear more about those later.

And now, I’m off to finish zipping up the suitcase and get some sleep.  If I’ve never met you before, I hope to meet you this year at Dreamforce.  If we’ve met before, it’ll be great to see you again.  And if you’re not able to make it to Dreamforce this year, fear not.  You can put Dreamforce 2010 on your calendar right now.  It’s December 6-9, 2010 and it’s once again in San Francisco.  I look forward to making your acquaintance there.

Dreamforce 09 is so close now. It begins next week in San Francisco and it’s without a doubt going to be the most exciting conference I go to this year. This will be my fifth Dreamforce and they grow not only in attendance, but in value each year.

It’s hard to believe, but four years and two months ago when they held Dreamforce 05, it was attended by about 3,500 people. We all nicely fit over at Moscone West, a small part of the entire convention center. This year, just 4+ years later, there are going to be more than 15,000 people in attendance. Not only is that mind-boggling, it can even be a bit daunting to some people. My aim is to give you some simple, yet effective tips on how to best enjoy Dreamforce, whether this is your first time, or maybe you’ve been coming for years. Try them out and see what works best for you.

New Attendee Orientation

If this is your first Dreamforce, you really should attend the New Attendee Orientation on Tuesday night at 5 PM in room N134. Led by Tom Wong, a.k.a. “Dreamforce Man”, you’ll get even more tips and tricks that help prepare you for an experience like no other. It’ll help set the tone for the whole week and you’ll be prepared to navigate the conference with ease.

The Expo

Browse the exhibitor guide online and look through the printed guide when you get your registration packet.  Plan out the “must visit” vendors you’re most interested in and memorize their location in the exhibit hall.  They can be your reference points for every time you explore.

Approach any exhibitor – If their sign doesn’t tell you enough about who they are, don’t just walk on by.  Stop and ask questions.  Regardless of whether their product applies to you directly today or not, you’ll learn more about what’s possible with Salesforce.  These people share a passion for Salesforce like you do and they’ll help expand your vision.

Carry a pad of Post-It notes in your gear bag – Undoubtedly, you’ll pick up information at throughout the Expo and you’ll want to distribute it to others when you get home.  Start organizing from the start by attaching a note for who you want to share the information with as well as any details you spoke with the vendor about but don’t want to forget.

Hit the Campground and hit it HARD – The Campground is your connection to the people of Salesforce.  There are experts in every aspect of Salesforce, from Security to Services and from Process to Programming.  They’re there for one simple purpose – to make you successful.  Take advantage of 1 on 1 time with people you’d run into no place but there.  If you’ve got a business issue you’ve been trying to figure out for months, bring it to them and see what they’d do.  Free and valuable advice is there for the taking.

Keynotes

Get there early – While the keynote hall is big, it’s going to be packed to the gills with 15,000+ of you new friends and you’ll want to get a decent seat.  Plan your day around keynotes as they’re packed with goodies, tidbits, and nuggets of success to bring home.

Don’t bug out – Stick around to the end of the keynotes.  They’ve planned buffers between keynotes and breakouts so you’ll get there.  Yes, breakout sessions can fill up, but keynotes are “good to the last drop”

Breakout Sessions

Don’t be surprised that they’ll fill up.  There are over 300 breakouts this year, but be sure to plan for alternate ones you’ll attend if the one you get to is full.  While it can be frustrating to not get into the one you want to attend, you can take a little comfort in the fact that Salesforce will publish videos of the breakouts after the Dreamforce.  You can watch for them on The Salesforce Channel as they get published.

General

Introduce yourself – You’re among friends (or they will be your friends soon).  Don’t be afraid that you won’t have anything to talk about.  You’re both interested in Salesforce and that’s a HUGE conversation starter.  When you attend a keynote or breakout, don’t just occupy a chair.  Turn around and see who’s around you.  You’ve got a lot to learn from each other.

Grab lunch with people like you – Wednesday and Thursday, lunch is organized by tables of topics or industries.  Take advantage of this time to learn how people like you use Salesforce at their company.  It’s not just lunch, it’s resources for the future.

Quick Tips

• Mail heavy stuff like books and print materials home from your hotel business center – It’s probably cheaper than extra luggage
• If you bring a laptop, bring a power strip with you and make friends by sharing an outlet with someone else
• Bring tons of business cards – You’ll need them to help make future connections with customers and vendors
• Pack an umbrella – You might not need it, but San Francisco is unpredictable and it’s better to be prepared
• Don’t just head back to your hotel – Spend a little time out with others before calling it a day – The social interaction will do you good
• Use a camera to quick snap pictures of Breakout Session PowerPoint slides for easy recall
• Wear comfortable shoes – You’ll be on your feet a lot as well as for the walk to Moscone – Happy feet make for a happy me
• Win some great stuff – I hear that the Amazon Kindle is the giveaway of choice this year, but tons of other stuff is out there too
• Listen to the buzz – Dreamforce will be covered on Twitter with amazing velocity this year.  See what’s being said here http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23df09
• Watch what’s happening on The Salesforce Channel – Videos during and after Dreamforce will be available here http://www.salesforcechannel.com/pages/dreamforce09
• Last up – Have fun

Anyone who knows me reasonably well knows I’m a Disney fanatic.  Whether it’s my coffee cup, my Goofy winter hat, reading blogs about it or going to the theme parks each year, I enjoy Disney all the time.  Their theme for 2009 has been “What will you celebrate?”  The goal is to get people in the park to celebrate anything; a birthday, wedding, anniversary, first tooth, or whatever.  This past summer, my wife and I went to Disneyland for our first trip without kids.  That was celebration enough, but since it was over my birthday, I got in the park free that day.  ($72 is worth celebrating if you ask me)

I felt inspired to take Disney’s question and adapt it to Dreamforce 09 in San Francisco this year.  I want to ask you, “What will you take home this year?”  While the trinkets and booth giveaways are great fun, that’s not what I’m talking about.  (Though I would like to thank Manticore for giving me a pen last year that has become my favorite)  What I want to know is what inspiration are you going to take home?  What seed of change is going to be planted in you that you’ll bring home and begin transforming your organization?

The inspiration for this question came from a video created by Jenna Baze (@Rather_Geeky) for the Dreamforce video contest this year.  Her premise; “Send me to Dreamforce so I can get my nickname back.”  She explained how she gained nicknames like AJ (Awesome Jenna) and Ozzie (Wizard of Oz) over the past year and half for the wizardry she did with Salesforce.  Business has changed though and maybe the systems haven’t changed to keep up with demand.  Jenna wants to go to Dreamforce to be inspired, learn a ton, and return to claim her nicknames back.

Jenna’s story is exactly why so many people need to attend Dreamforce.  I know in tough economic times, it’s hard to justify travel, time off work, and the cost of entrance to the conference.  Ironically, it’s in the toughest of economic times that people should be investing in sending people like Jenna to Dreamforce.  The insight gained, the connections made, the skills attained all add up to what I believe is one of the greatest returns on your Salesforce investment the whole year.

So while it’s great to hope for the nifty laser pen or the flying monkey to take home, there’s much more to be gained at Dreamforce than just that “stuff.”  Think about what you could bring home from Dreamforce that won’t run out of ink or batteries.  Think about what you can do to become a hero at your organization.  The ideas are there for the taking.  You in?

Suppose 63,000 companies that use the same software decide to take part in the world’s largest mass software upgrade event.  They all wanted to take advantage of some the great new features made available in “Snowman 10″, the code-name given to this new release.  They divide themselves into two groups and agree that group A will upgrade on one Friday night and group B will upgrade the following Friday night.

All the companies realize that in order to make this upgrade happen, they’re going to have to plan ahead.  They’re going to need test servers, database space, project managers, network engineers, application administrators, data backups, and most of all, they’re all going to need time.  Time to setup, time to install, time to configure, time to test, time to backup, time to deploy, time to test, and time to celebrate the completion of a successful software upgrade.

For the sake of easy math, let’s only look at the cost of the upgrade weekend.  Let’s assume that each company will need 1.5 people for 12 hours on the weekend of the upgrade, pretty much equal to 18 man-hours.  Assuming an average wage of $100 per hour, each company will pay approximately $1,800 in labor that weekend.  That doesn’t sound so bad, does it?

$1,800 x 63,000 companies = $113.4 million

Assuming a happy outcome and all the companies get upgraded with no glitches, everyone’s happy.  But what happens to that $1,800 price tag when something goes wrong?  It goes up like crazy and for most companies, they’ve got to scramble to get that software running again by Monday morning or somebody’s going to be updating their resume.