Springtime for Salesforce.com

Woodson Martin, vice president of strategy EMEA, Salesforce.com explained to BusinessCloud9 why the company has decided to update its customer interface: "It’s been a few years [since our last user interface update]. People build business processes around them, and it takes them a little while to absorb change so you don’t want to keep changing the user experience too frequently.  And of course, we release it as an option so customers can opt-in at a time that’s convenient time for them, and not us."

67,900 customers utilise Salesforce.com’s platforms, which include app development environment, Force.com, and customer service solution, Service Cloud 2. Martin explained that many of the new features and streamlined functionality came as a result of customer feedback from the Salesforce.com community: "Like so much you’re going to see in Spring ‘10, the feedback of customer community, our ideas exchanges, through usability, are playing out in this release – especially with things to do with customer experience."
 

Two significant features planned for Sales Cloud 2 users are ‘Real-time quotes with quote sync’, and ‘Mobile Lite for all editions’:

Real-Time Quotes with Quote Sync: With real-time quotes, sales reps will now be able to use Sales Cloud 2 to automatically populate quotes with relevant customer data. Sales reps will be able to generate and send sales quotes to prospects with just a few clicks. Since sales reps often go through multiple quotes when working to close a deal, the new quote sync feature will enable sales reps to sync the final quote with the opportunity in one simple click. In addition, the Force.com API provides easy integration with outside systems, like forecasts and supply chains, to ensure that sales reports are updated in real-time.

Mobile Lite for All Editions: Mobile Lite will enable users of any edition of salesforce.com to access Sales Cloud 2 and Service Cloud 2 from their mobile devices. The Mobile Lite service will allow end users to log calls and emails, update activities and tasks as well as view account and contact details, leads, opportunities, cases, solutions, assets, and dashboards, all from their mobile device. Previously only available to Professional edition or above, Mobile Lite will offer a subset of the features available in the full mobile version. 

Customers of Salesforce.com’s customer service platform Service Cloud 2, will find expanded functionality with ‘Salesforce Answers’ and ‘Entitlements and Service Contracts’:

Salesforce Answers: For years, customer service centres have been limited to knowledge articles produced by company employees and have not benefited from the explosion of consumer wisdom that exists across the Web. Utilising Service Cloud 2, Salesforce Answers will deliver an online experience that will help companies leverage the expertise in the Cloud for their customers. Salesforce Answers will enable companies to start the conversation with a unique online customer community, leveraging crowd-source knowledge and Facebook.

Entitlements and Service Contracts: With Spring '10, call centre agents using the Service Cloud 2 will have access to powerful tools to track service entitlements and contracts. Enterprises will be able to maintain service level agreements by organising customers by support levels, all in the Cloud.

Users of the company’s Cloud application platform, Force.com, will receive functionality to create Cloud-based Rich Internet Applications (RIA) with ‘Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com’, a jointly developed environment, and ‘Authenticated Sites’:

Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com: Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com is a jointly developed integrated development environment that will provide a single tool for building cloud-based RIAs, which can easily be deployed to end users through the browser using the Adobe Flash Player or directly to the desktop via Adobe AIR.

Developers will be able to use Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com to extend or enhance existing Salesforce CRM implementations and custom-built Force.com applications, or build entirely new applications to provide customized user experiences for any business need.

Authenticated Sites: With the new authenticated sites feature in Spring '10, companies will be able to run both public and private authenticated web sites on the Force.com platform. Customers will be able to easily add important user security functionality like self-registration, secure login UI components and security profile data filtering all without writing a single line of code. With this new feature, customers will be able to create and run new types of web sites on Force.com like e-commerce, customer communities and event registration.

"Spring '10 represents the 31st generation of cloud computing excellence and in addition to real-time product breakthroughs, we are proud to announce a new UI for our customers at no additional cost or upgrade headaches. The brand new UI is the result of Salesforce.com's relentless focus on usability and adoption, which has made us the leader in enterprise Cloud Computing," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO at Salesforce.com.