Today at its Dreamforce user conference, Salesforce.com announced Visualforce: the ability to modify the Salesforce UI on the fly. In the past, the Salesforce UI was pretty much hard-coded: e.g., tabs at the top. Now, by clicking an edit button at the bottom of a page, you can use a script language to turn on and off such UI features in realtime. Furthermore, you can customize the UI for a specific platform, so that the same application running on a PC looks different from the same application running on an iPhone.
This is a huge step in making applications much more user-centric, what I consider the hallmark of apps moving forward. (Discussed in detail in my Copernican Revolution report published last year.)
Salesforce also announced Salesforce Content, a new service derived from their Koral acquisition. It's basically in-context content management: rather than storing marketing and sales documents in other repositories (e.g., SharePoint or Documentum) companies can store them in Salesforce. When a company generates a sales proposal to a prospect, they can store it with their Salesforce record. However, it's not just an attachment capability. Users can vote on content (giving a thumbs up to a good datasheet and a thumbs down to a bad datasheet), subscribe to alterations in content (notify me when the pricelist changes), and see which is most popular based on downloads.
This is an interesting alternative to horizontal collaboration and content solutions such as SharePoint 2007. Rather than getting into an IT-centric platform debate, business units will buy Salesforce Content to solve a specific problem they have (the sales reps can't find the relevant documents easily). This is a camel-getting-its-nose-in-the-tent move by Salesforce.com.
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