A full day of exciting news and great takeaways…

  • The first General Session was full of new enhancements to Salesforce.com, the biggest being the new Platform-as-a-Service called Force.com. “With the Force.com platform, you can build any application, any database, any logic, and run it all on demand on our trusted, secure infrastructure. Now salesforce.com allows customers to create and run any application and even any user interface imaginable—all entirely on Force.com.” (Force.com) Mark Benioff showed how Disney, EA and Bronx Lab School has used Force.com to develop a unconventional use of Salesforce.com
  • The second big news was the release of Visualforce, defined as the User Interface-as-a-Service. This allows you to customize the look and feel of the user interface on Salesforce.com including removing the tabs, recent items, related lists, etc. One of the best uses of it is going to be the ability to create new records across multiple objects. For example, you will be able to create a new account, contact and opportunity on the same page. Less clicks-more success.
  • Next were two applications that will affect how every Salesforce.com is used. They are Salesforce Content and Salesforce Ideas. Salesforce Content gives you the ability to tag, share, subscribe and rate documentation that you have posted. You can create a tag cloud for all of your documentation, preview the content in the App without having to download it, subscribe to documents so that when a new version of the document comes out you will get notified, rate the documents and comment on them. This eliminates the searching for the right documents. Salesforce Ideas brings the IdeaExchange to each of the Salesforce.com customers so that you can have your own internal or external IdeaExchange specific to your organization.
  • Other announcements for the Winter ‘08 release include inline editing (being able to double click on any field in Salesforce.com and edit that individual field with out having to edit the whole object), Tagging any record, recording a history of edits on Accounts and Contacts (for example, you can see when and whole last updated the phone number on an Account or Contact), Opportunity Hierarchy, Dynamic Report Headers, Campaign Hierarchies, Campaign sharing and 16 new Campaign reports.

It was a great first session and I am really excited about what is coming. What do you think of the new platform, new visualforce or new features?