What Salesforce.com Is Wearing This Spring

By Tracey E. Schelmetic

Editorial Director,
Customer Interaction Solutions magazine

 

On-demand business services provider Salesforce.com (News - Alert) last week announced the release of Salesforce Spring ’07, the company's 22^nd generation release. Spring ‘07 features AppSpace, a new product which enables companies to engage with customers using Salesforce and AppExchange applications inside a secure, branded online environment. AppSpace is scheduled to be made a part of Spring ‘07 in April. In addition, Spring '07 was created to advance every component of what Salesforce.com calls its "Circle of Success," which includes IdeaExchange, Salesforce applications, the Apex Developer Network, Apex platform, and the AppExchange.

 

The new release is the first featuring Salesforce.com's AppSpace solution, announced in the fall. AppSpace is a new concept that enables a company to extend the power of its Salesforce, Apex and AppExchange applications directly to its customers. It was designed to go beyond traditional customer self-service and enable every department to collaborate directly with the customer to elevate the customer experience and improve internal productivity.

 

Said Salesforce.com Chairman Marc Benioff (News - Alert), “Just as MySpace brought together individuals on the consumer Web, AppSpace will bring together companies and their customers on the business Web. We are excited to bring the 'End of Software' to portals and blaze a new way for enterprises to engage richly and securely with their customers.”

 

To better understand AppSpace and other new elements in Spring '07, I got a moment to speak with Bruce Francis, VP of Corporate Strategy for Salesforce.com.

 

Said Bruce, "AppSpace is a new model for enterprises to engage customers on demand. We're thinking about it as a sort of enterprise-class MySpace. Companies today have a lot of touch points and a lot of information they want and need to share, but they don't really have a good way of using it. Portals have taken them part of the way, but not in a full, rich Web 2.0 sort of way. Customers are expecting this kind of experience — they get it when they use the Web for consumer interactions. What AppSpace does is give enterprises an environment to work with and collaborate with their customers on not only giving them information, but applications."

 

Bruce cited an example. "Let's say I'm an ad agency. I have hundreds or thousands of clients. I work with those clients on a number of different areas, using many different applications. My creative team is sending clients things like PDFs. We're also working on lots of create projects with clients…maybe ad campaigns. There might be contracts we're working on together. We might be tracking expenses on a couple of projects on various spreadsheets. All of these applications can be put out there in AppSpace."

 

"We think this adds up to the end of the portal," said Bruce. "In other words, this is not your father's portal. This kind of Web 2.0 experience that includes Salesforce and AppExchange apps is really where we think all of this needs to go to give customers an engaged experience."

 

Spring '07 is also notable for some other interesting new features. It's the first release being based on ideas from people in the community based on IdeaExchange. Introduced in October of 2006, IdeaExchange (http://ideas.salesforce.com) is an online community where the salesforce.com community can create, comment on and promote new feature ideas. In less than six months, IdeaExchange has seen strong growth in traffic and influence with more than 2,500 new ideas posted, more than 42,000 promotions and more than 3,700 comments. (Bruce joked that in the future, everyone will know exactly what's to appear in future Salesforce.com releases simply by checking the most popular exchanges in IdeaExchange and that it could potentially put the company's PR department out of business.) He noted correctly that the addition of new features to enterprise solutions has not exactly been an open process with many of Salesforce.com's competitors.

 

Additionally, there are new feature in Spring '07 that will allow users to set up key processes and reminders based on time. Users can set up a chain of events —things that might need to trigger at the end of the quarter, or 30 days of after some action taken by the user.

 

Bruce also pointed out the addition in this new version of e-mail approval, which he said was a very hotly requested feature. Spring ‘07 enables workflow requests to flow seamlessly through the organization even when approvers aren't logged in. Approvers can simply respond to e-mail messages from anywhere on any device — quickly approving, rejecting and commenting on requests.

 

Spring ’07 is available immediately to all 646,000 Salesforce.com subscribers. AppSpace is currently scheduled to be available in April for limited release with general availability scheduled for the third quarter of 2008.