Make your Salesforce Project More Successful by Inviting a BA to the Party (Or Thinking Like One)


Today I welcome my good friend, Garry Polmateer as a guest blogger at CRMFYI. Garry is not only a Salesforce community rockstar, but he's planned and executed some great Salesforce implementations,

A Little Help from My Friends


In a demonstration of community and collaboration, Mike Gerholdt and I have created a blog post / demo video of utilizing inline Visualforce to display rich text info in standard page layouts without

Chatter-vantage #1 - No Need to Rush the Stage


Salesforce has created a conference attendee experience using Chatter that blows away all other conferences. Their Dreamforce Attendee Portal allows attendees to connect with speakers before, during

I Need You; to Join The Salesforce Channel Community


If you follow me on Twitter, it's hard to miss my regular status updates like,  "21 videos were posted to The Salesforce Channel today," but what's that all about? The Salesforce Channel is a website

Calling All Heroes! You Belong at Dreamforce


Earlier this year, I wrote about being a hero to your users, and the gist of it was that through social media, you can surround yourself with fantastic people who will make you a hero to your users. I

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» Google App Engine

How Low Can it Go? (The Barrier to Entry in Cloud Computing, that is)

Posted on June 19, 2009 by Jeff Grosse in News | 9 Comments

LimboIt 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/ )