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Joys of the Anywhere Nowhere Office

Posted on August 8, 2010 by Jeff Grosse in Productivity | 8 Comments

A few weeks ago I read a post by Steve Gillmor from Salesforce.com about The Office of the Future which pointed out how high tech (iPad, iPhone, GoToMeeting, Skype) and “low rent” (McDonalds parking lot) the office of the future is for some already.

Last night, I was getting ready to go out for the night to do a video shoot and some post-production work when I stopped to think, “Should I bring my laptop with me?” Only a couple of thoughts later in my mind, I concluded that my office is not just an anywhere office, it’s really at the same time a nowhere office. I headed out the door with only a iPhone in hand, yet I knew that I wouldn’t lose productivity that night on account of the lack of technology I was carrying.

In video post-production, you spend a lot of time designing the look and feel you need for a project, then when it comes to output, you can spend hours waiting for your work to be rendered, encoded and finally published to whatever medium you choose. What can you do while you’re waiting? The answer is be productive on a computer that’s anyone’s.

A majority of the business tools I use every day don’t live on a hard drive. They’re in the cloud so Im not locked to a physical office location, nor even to a specific piece of hardware like a laptop or a network to be productive.

What could I do from the edit bay while my projects were rendering and encoding?

I could into Salesforce.com, send some custom email templates to prospective customers and update opportunities I am working on. I could add publishing and video view analytics from The Salesforce Channel to the custom objects in Salesforce and update my channel performance dashboard.

I could search for, organize, filter, and publish videos for The Salesforce Channel all from a standard web browser. Even all my tag groupings are stored in Google Docs so I wasn’t more than a login away from all that.

I could use HootSuite to look at all my favorite Twitter groups and send updates off to my Facebook profile and Pages as well as LinkedIn and obviously Twitter. Through the browser, HootSuite give me a consistent user interface with the same productivity and immediate connectivity to all my networks. All configurations are stored in the cloud and look the same, no matter where I log in.

I could look for new blog posts and status updates on the most important companies and people I talk to each week using Gist. I don’t need to install any app; I go to the Gist website and all my interactions, whether email, calendar, Facebook or Twitter are stack-ranked by importance on my Gist dashboard.

I could work on a collaborative planning spreadsheet, document, or wiki page using Google Docs and Sites instead of tossing files on flash drives and never-ending email threads with constant revisions.

Truthfully, I was able to do all the above work securely, in the cloud, with need for nothing more than the browser on the Mac Pro I happened to be using while encoding the video. I didn’t need processor power; it happened in the cloud. I didn’t need a flash drive because my files and data were all in the cloud. I didn’t need to install applications or plugins or even use a certain browser. My work just gets done wherever I am. And if I’m in the edit bay or on a friend’s laptop or even at my mom’s house, I can be just as productive because my anywhere nowhere office is all I need.

New Salesforce Contact Manager Edition Makes it Affordable for SMBs to Get In the Cloud

Posted on September 1, 2009 by Jeff Grosse in News, Sales | 19 Comments

biz If you’re a small business and haven’t heard of Salesforce.com, it’s time you get to know them. It’s Salesforce that really pioneered “the cloud,” or running your business without a server, and today they’ve made it affordable for you to effectively manage your business contacts on an enterprise-class platform that’s accessible anywhere there’s a browser. And when your business grows, Salesforce can grow with you.

For years, large companies have managed their business relationships and processes using rather complex software known as Customer Relationship Management, or CRM for short. While businesses of all size need to manage this contact and relationship data, it was often the more expensive solutions which had the best ways of managing that data and adapt to unique business requirements. Then about ten years ago, a company called Salesforce.com got started with a goal of eliminating the need for companies to buy software and manage the complex project of upgrading it, just to get marginally useful new features. Salesforce had a goal of making incremental changes available to all their customers regularly (about three times a year), without disrupting business and without burdening the customer with all that hassle. What they found was, companies of all size started flocking to their business model. It make information easily, securely available to the right people, at the right time, to help make the right decisions in business.

As you can imagine though, there’s a cost to managing that infrastructure, developing new features, and making sure that upgrades go smoothly, while still coming up with new and innovative features that help businesses grow. And while many large companies like Dell, Japan Post, Avon, and Citibank have been able to leverage Salesforce to improve their business processes and effectively manage some of their most important data, other small to medium businesses were able to use lower-cost editions of Salesforce that allowed them many of the core features of Salesforce and grow into Salesforce as their businesses grow. Though each company may license a different edition of Salesforce, they all run on the same world-class platform that is reliable and secure.

Today, Salesforce has made available it’s most affordable edition of Salesforce yet, still with the key core of CRM that all the bigger companies use, but at a price that small business can manage. Here are the details.

Salesforce Contact Manager Edition is designed for 1 or 2 users to effectively track business relationships using the core of Salesforce known as Accounts and Contacts. It’s priced at just $9 per user, per month and here’s what else you get. There’s built-in integration to Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, or any other email system. You get a reporting engine to easily see what data you have in Salesforce and slice and dice it as you want. You also get built-in integration to Google Apps like Gmail, Google Talk, Google Spreadsheets, and Google Docs.

Contact

And if you’re thinking that all that sounds good, but it must be too complex to customize and make it work the way your business works, it’s not hard at all. Salesforce Contact Manager Edition is designed with easy to understand videos, tips, tricks, and how-to’s to make you successful immediately, without having to read a book, learn about programming, or anything difficult.

GettingStarted

And what happens when your business grows and you need more users to access it or you need more complex applications to manage your sales leads or forecast your sales pipeline? You just call Salesforce and upgrade to another edition with the features you need. There’s no need to hire a consulting company or form a six month project to move up; Salesforce grows with your business.

One of the amazing things is, as Salesforce comes out with new features, you’ll see new functionality added to Salesforce and you’ll always be on the newest release. You’ll always have access to your data. You’ll always be able to customize Salesforce to meet your unique business needs, and you’ll always know your data is safe, with a company that’s trusted by some of the biggest organizations in the world. Small or large, Salesforce is meeting the needs of business.

And now, you can give it a try without even spending a dime. There’s a 14 day free trial of Salesforce Contact Manager Edition that you can sign up for and after that, it’s just $9 per user, per month. There are many new videos on YouTube to help launch your success on this new edition of Salesforce. There’s a community website for you to learn more about Salesforce, get to know other users of Salesforce around the world, ask your questions, get best practices on managing your data, and even give your input on the features you’d like to see added to or changed in Salesforce. There will also be new applications and enhancements to Salesforce available to you from the AppExchange, Salesforce’s own “iTunes of Business Applciations.” And if you want to find out how much more you can do with Salesforce, consider attending Dreamforce coming up this November. It’s where you’ll learn what 12,000 other people are transforming their business with the power of Salesforce.

Trazzler, a startup focused on helping travelers answer the question, “Where should I go?” was an early adopter of Salesforce Contact Manager Edition had this to say about it. ”At Trazzler we are using Contact Manager Edition to manage thousands of business contacts, each segmented by category, company size, and geographic region. Contact Manager Edition has enabled me to experience the benefits of cloud computing first hand,” said Adam Rugel, CEO and founder of Trazzler.

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

Limbo 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/ )

Salesforce.com CEO, Marc Benioff Earns a “Bozo?”

Posted on November 17, 2008 by Jeff Grosse in AppExchange, Competitors, Force.com, Integration, Tools | 2 Comments

bozo 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.