Salesforce expands product categories for on-demand
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(InfoWorld) - Although the major news at the Salesforce.com Dreamforce developer conference in San Francisco this week was VisualforceÂ , CEO Marc Benioff had a few other surprise announcements up his sleeve to keep an overflow audience interested in listening to almost all of his two-hour keynote address. The introduction of Salesforce IdeasÂ  and Salesforce ContentÂ  expands Salesforce offerings to six product lines and takes the company farther afield from its original target audience of CRM and Salesforce Automation application users. Salesforce Content is content management as a service. The on-demand application will employ tagging, subscriptions, and user recommendations to allow users to manage documents, both structured and unstructured. While users can deploy full-text searches for documents and content, no details were given on how documents can be retrieved for more complex searches, such as e-mail searches by date, time, or subject matter, typically used for e-discovery. Under the heading "You can't always be first," Salesforce Ideas puts social networking in a business context, which is not unlike IBM's Web 2.0 Goes To Work initiative announcement made last spring. Ideas will allow Salesforce customers to collaborate from within the company's Salesforce applications. According to Parker Harris, a Salesforce co-founder, Ideas will allow those in collaboration mode to rate and vote on ideas. For example, the best ideas for advancing company goals would bubble higher up to the top of the list of all ideas under discussion. Users will be able to build separate online communities by department or any other grouping chosen. Ideas are posted, along with graphical content when needed, and opened up to a collaborative environment. The immediate feedback, "instant" focus groups, according to a Salesforce statement, can be kept behind the firewall or opened up to partners and customers alike. Salesforce Ideas and Content will be available in limited release and are scheduled to be fully delivered in 2008.
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(Source: Webex)  Using on-Demand web services, companies around the globe are discovering new ways to reach, handle, and satisfy a constantly growing customer-base.  Here are four companies that made it happen.
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Customer relationship management (CRM) specialist Salesforce.com is adding customization features to its hosted suite as well as increasing its reliance on partners to develop complementary applications.
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(InfoWorld) - SAP continued to ramp up its on-demand CRM offering this week, announcing that it will now include service-level capabilities, the third key component of CRM solutions. In February SAP kicked off its software as a service business with a sales force automation solution. In May the company added marketing, and in its third update within the year it is now announcing SAP Service. Liz Herbert, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, said that the SAP CRM solution is now displaying the kind of depth SAP is known for. "SAP added a component for managing products that many on-demand CRM vendors don't have. You can use it as the product master or bring in the product master which is typically found in the ERP system," said Herbert. The new service component includes Service Ticket Management, Rule-based Service Ticket Distribution, and Service Level Monitoring. Also included is a rules-base service-level determination calculator that automates the routing of service tickets based on a customer's service level agreement, said Angela Bandlow, vice president at CRM Solutions Marketing. "It's a tiered service that tracks SLAs based on the customer and the required response time," said Bandlow. One of the key differentiators for the SAP offering, according to both Bandlow and Forrester's Herbert, is its ability to integrate easily with MySAP ERP systems on the back end. Using product information found in the ERP system, a sales person can pull up manufacturing availability and pricing information and deliver a quote in real time online. Bandlow said while this completes the three major components of SAP CRM OnDemand, quarterly updates can be expected with the next update due in December. To date, the solution, like almost all on-demand solutions, is not industry-specific. But Bandlow said the company is looking at that and will respond to customer demand.
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NetSuite has updated the e-commerce piece of its NetSuite hosted application suite, allowing users to manage sales efforts on eBay Inc.'s action site
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New products to build Web services with Eclipse, e-commerce apps with Amazon's technology, and more.
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Updated OS includes software applications designed for business users.
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Link to Salesforce.com data brings "software as a service" offering to back-office data integration tools.
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Hosted CRM service provider Salesforce.com took another step forward last week in its strategy to build an online ecosystem of vendors that offer software as a service.
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Company enhances online service for moving business information between corporations.
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Company is upgrading current support and service program to draw more mainframe customers.
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InfoWorld - eBay this week is expanding its developers program, providing a single API schema to link to the e-commerce vendor&#8217;s site and adding other resources.
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Salesforce.comÂ is starting to provide some details about the next version of its hosted CRM (customer relationship management) software, including the product's primary focus, which will be customization.
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TechWeb - Spiceworks is adding more IT management features to its free, ad-supported software, for which over 5,000 customers have signed up in about a month's time.
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InfoWorld - Business software vendor SAP has added an offering to its growing suite of quickly deployable applications aimed at helping businesses manage specific tasks across diverse industries.
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InfoWorld - In search of new markets and customers, SAP AG is developing a new breed of hosted, on-demand products and looking at ways to make its complex business software easier to use.
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SAN FRANCISCO -- Salesforce.com (Quote, Chart) CEO Marc Benioff is hoping to do to call centers and help desks what he has accomplished in the CRM space.