CRM FYI

It seems that in the midst of tightening budgets, reducing workforces, and declining revenues, you’d think there would be no such thing as something for free.  Who’s going to give away anything for nothing?  It seems that Salesforce and Google are happy to give stuff away.  Your company can get Google Apps Stadard Edition for up to 100 50 users absolutely for free.  That includes Google Docs, Google Sites, Google Talk, Google Mobile, Google Calendar, and Gmail.  Google is also giving away   If you’re a developer, you can get started on Google App Engine for Java, create, and deploy scalable apps on Google’s scalable architecture, with zero investment.  Then just this week, Salesforce announced Force.com Free Edition.  But what can you do with that, you ask?  A heck of a lot, actually.

Anyone can sign up for Force.com Free Edition.  All it takes is filling out your contact info.  And what do you get for a little info about yourself? You get one System Administrator User and up to 99 other “Standard Users” as well as;

• The comprehensive capabilities of the Force.com platform
• One custom app
• One Web site with up to 250,000 page views per month
• Up to 10 custom objects (custom database tables) per user
• A sandbox development environment to test the app or site before deploying it
• Free online training
• A library of sample applications

As System Administrator, you’ll see all the standard objects like Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, Leads, and Cases.  As a Standard User, you can’t see those objects.  Someone asked me the other day, “What’s the point of Free Edition without CRM for those 99 other users?”  The use is “proof of concept.”  Anybody even thinking of trying out Cloud Computing can now get their own instance of Salesforce, and programmers and non-programmers alike, can build their own custom apps, completely for free; zero investment.  And as you see from the features, you can even use new Salesforce Sites functionality to build a public web page to display as much or as little of your data as you want to anyone in the world.

If you’re even considering moving a business application ot the cloud (which you should be considering), you need to check out Force.com Free Edition.  Literally, the only risk you run is spending your time investigating it.  They’ve even provided you with a sample recruiting app to try out and customize.

The risk has never smaller, the cost has never been lower, the time has never been better to look into Cloud Computing.  I highly recommend you check out a great blog post by Appirio’s Balakrishna Narasimhan posted this week about “What Force.com Free Edition & Force.com Sites Mean for the Enterprise.”  Appirio is even offering workshops to accelerate the process of helping you get in the cloud.  Check it out.

There’s no doubt, Salesforce and Google are offering these services for free to get you hooked on them.  At the same time, consider the money your IT department is sinking in infrastructure and software licensing today.  Cloud computing is transforming businesses right now.  Nothing mission critical to business ever comes for free, but some some strategic investments will be made by thousands of companies this year in the cloud, and those companies are going to see the power, security, scalability, reliability , and cost savings of the cloud.  Salesforce and Google are leading the way.

(Thanks to Torrez for the picture.www.flickr.com/photos/torrez/ )

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.

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.