At the Dreamforce 2004 Salesforce.com user conference,
the company said it will continue 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 customise 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.
Customisations created using the toolkit are accessible through
a web service API for additional integration.
With this release Salesforce.com is also continuing to promote
new ways to use 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 suppliers and their catalog of hosted services.
All of the suppliers 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 centre,
e-mail, marketing, ERP, integration, and social networking.
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 customisation 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
be available on 15 November.
Ephraim Schwartz writes for Infoworld