I just returned from Salesforce.com’s annual conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. dreamforce ‘11 had a record attendance of over 40K participants. Frankly I’m amazed at how smoothly the whole event was run as I didn’t see a glitch. The theme of “social” was prolific, with “Let’s Get Social” and “Welcome to the Social Enterprise”, everywhere. After two days of social it makes me wish this keyboard had a like icon on it, but alas it doesn’t.

CEO Mark Benihoff’s two hour (yes, two plus hour) long keynote on Wednesday was all about social, and how the concept of being social has created a social divide between the enterprise and users who have grown accustomed to having access to all manner of social applications. Of course he was here to fix all that, and this theme was the backdrop to a score of new feature enhancements and applications that were unveiled at the show. In his keynote Mark provided a three step process to bridging the divide between the enterprise and the end user:

• 1. Create a Social Customer Profile - keeping track of your customers and growing and evolving your information about your customers, in terms of the social media they are using, and building that into your customer profile so that you know what they are saying on Twitter, liking on Facebook, etc.
• 2. Create an Employee Social Network that is more than creating a private Facebook type of application for your employees, which includes collaboration, but not another island of collaboration or data. Mark spoke about integrating collaboration into all areas of the enterprise, including custom applications, sales, service, etc.
• 3. Create a customer social network and product social network - hooking products onto the network, including social media.

A primary theme of the event, along with social, was of course that the core of the social enterprise is multi-tenant cloud computing. Mark said that the cloud should be fast, no hardware or software required, easy to use with automatic upgrades and a pay-as-you-go model, open, and available to everyone.

Then it was time to roll out the announcements, which included:

● Chatter Now: providing Chatter users with presence capability so they can see when other users are online, and chat and screen share without leaving Chatter.

● Chatter Customer Groups: allowing Chatter users to invite people outside of their organization into their Chatter network to collaborate. This extends collaboration outside of the organization, and Salesforce claims it has done a huge amount of work on making this private and secure, so invitees only see what you or your group members allow them to see, and users can’t accidentally invite a bunch of people in that shouldn’t be in the group, for example.

● Chatter Approvals: will enable users to take action on any approval process from directly within their Chatter feed, of all types such as sales discounts, hiring decisions, vacation requests etc.

● Chatter Service: Salesforce claims this will be the ultimate self-service destination for the social enterprise, allowing customers to pose questions in a familiar social feed, and get instantaneous answers from multiple sources including those from within the company and from outside social networks. So it might be a knowledge base, the community of experts or a service agent, Facebook, or some other repository.

● Data.com: provides sales and marketing professionals from within Salesforce.com the information they need to effectively plan, target and execute sales and marketing campaigns, by helping them to build and maintain social customer profiles, by unifying socially-crowd sourced contact information from Jigsaw and company information from Dun & Bradstreet (D&B).

Beyond all the social networking bells and whistles that were announced, was delivery of those bells and whistles. Mark announced Touch.salesforce.com, which will leverages the open standard HTML5 technology to provide an optimized experience of Salesforce applications and customizations for multiple smart phones, tablet devices and operating systems.  

Mark also talked at length about new advancements in development as well, with more details to be found on the Salesforce.com website.

The demos were pretty good. For example, there was a demonstration of Salesforce.com being run natively on multiple devices, and it showed that from within the Chatter feed a user being able to get everything, on the device, including running multiple windows, looking up all customer data, including all of the social feeds available on the customer, conducting a meeting, closing a sale, and log the deal.

Mark ponied up some pretty key customers, such as Burberry and Toyota, showing their customer portals and all of the things that can be done to build a brand and following using Salesforce.com as the core. Maybe I’m a sucker for the hype, but I “liked” a few of them on Facebook as a result just to see what things were available. I’m expecting my Burberry’s free “new scent” sample any day now. Seriously, in all dreamforce, and the new products announced were an impressive lot.

Tags: Collaboration, Mobility //