Salesforce.com unveils Winter "05 at user conference

02.11.2004
Von Ephraim Schwartz

At the Dreamforce 2004 Salesforce.com user conference on Monday, the company that says "just say no to packaged applications" continued to expand on its strategy of tightly integrating its hosted solution with in-house enterprise applications.

Customforce.com, a new component of the Salesforce.com release, will give corporate developers a toolkit to customize a company?s CRM- or any service-based solution. The toolkit is targeted at those developers who are looking for ways to integrate, track, and manage data and business processes from other enterprise applications -- such as marketing, human resources, or IT -- into the Salesforce.com solution.

Customizations created using the toolkit are accessible through a Web service API for additional integration.

With this release Salesforce.com Inc. is also continuing to promote new ways to leverage itself as the core component in an on-demand ecosystem of services. To that end, the company announced a program dubbed On-Demand Marketplace, which amounts to an approved list of 60 vendors and their catalog of hosted services.

All of the vendors on the approved list use Salesforce.com Sforce platform for integration.

The Marketplace will include an interactive rating and user review section and an Sforce certification designation.

Services offered include data warehousing, contact center, e-mail, marketing, ERP, integration, and social networking, to name a few.

The Winter "05 core CRM solution has also been upgraded with a new Installed Products component that will allow a sales rep to capture and store company and competitive product data and services as well as a customer?s previous buying history.

Analytics have been upgraded as well with a Snapshots and Trends component that allows managers to view historical trends.

Sforce, the heart of its customization engine, now includes a lead management API and additional metadata capability to aid developers in designing mobile applications.

Winter "05 Salesforce.com CRM solution and its components will become available on Nov. 15.