Salesforce swings into its Summer '07 release
677979
New hosted CRM package offers customizable platform services, highlighting company's attempt to compete with SAP, Oracle, Microsoft.
350443
On Tuesday in Denver, Microsoft told its Worldwide Partners that the on-demand version of its customer relationship management (CRM) software will be released to early adopters later this summer, and will be available for a full market rollout in the first half of 2008.
516278
New products to build Web services with Eclipse, e-commerce apps with Amazon's technology, and more.
638749
The success of Facebook's Web-app building tools hasn't gone unnoticed by Salesforce.com, which on Friday announced a new platform for building on-demand business software that it hopes will lead to an "explosion" of applications.
7516
Salesforce.com definitely knows how to sell its solutions.
422652
(InfoWorld) - NetSuite, the other hosted CRM company, laid out version 2007.0 this week of its CRM, ERP, and PRM (partner relationship management) SaaS (software as a service) solution. The company unveiled NetSuite Assistants, a refinement of its current ERP solution that will make setup, data import, and ERP back-office management simpler, according to the company. Services within the Assistants suite include a setup assistant, a data import assistant, and a graphical transaction form assistant. Matrix Item Assistant will now allow for inventory tracking of multivariant products. NetSuite Global CRM and PRM adds the ability to manage orders, forecasts, quotas, and commissions on a per-country basis in local currency. Also included is a dashboard that can aggregate global information from across an organization into a single, consolidated view. An upgraded analytics capability, SuiteAnalytics, will add scorecards and the ability to include Excel-like customized formulas within a dashboard. As extensive as the additional functionality to the NetSuite suite is, perhaps the most noticeable part of the company's SaaS news was what wasn't announced. Unlike its archrival, Salesforce.com, NetSuite steered clear of discussing an integration platform technology, a programming language capability, or a program to add third-party applications such as Salesforce.com's AppExchange.Â  While NetSuite does have its own integration and customization technology, SuiteFlex, Craig Sullivan, vice president of international products, said NetSuite's strategy is to differentiate itself from competitors by giving companies all their business operations in a single application. "We understand it is important to integrate with other applications, especially when first deploying NetSuite, and we have those capabilities," Sullivan said. SuiteFlex includes a Web services architecture to integrate third-party applications. Sullivan added that users can configure and customize NetSuite through the UI and point-and-click technology rather than being code based. NetSuite 2007 will be rolled out to its current customers from June through August and starts at $499 per month, plus $99 for each user per month.
315905
Visualforce introduction Monday approaches the user interface as a service.
156566
Hoping to bridge the gap between software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications and on-premise application software, Informatica on Thursday released an on-demand service designed to swap data between Salesforce.com and two in-house database apps.
545488
BusinessWeek Online - Salesforce.com's  shares gained on Dec. 12, after the software services provider hiked its forecasts on sales for 2008.
622270
Link to Salesforce.com data brings "software as a service" offering to back-office data integration tools.
373117
Blog: Support for Acrobat and Reader has arrived for Microsoft Vista and Office 2007.
168881
Seeking to diversify beyond its sales-force-automation roots, Salesforce.com on Wednesday introduced a new on-demand call center and help desk application service called Supportforce.
82485
It's official: Salesforce CRM tools work with Safari on Mac OS X machines.
42720
Salesforce.com looks to make its developer platform a "peer with .Net and Java" with new user interface tools.
674921
A major facelift and a lot of great new functionality!  The Sugar Team is excited to bring you the 2.0 release.  As you can see, hiring a UI engineer has taken the application to a whole new level of usability and appeal.  Who else has a pink UI?  We're also pleased to bring you the Leads module and significant improvements to the Contact module with vCard support and a simplified way of entering a contact, account and appointment in the single "Create from Business Card" screen.   You can send us an email any time with your feedback at contact@sugarcrm.com.  Our goal continues to be to build the sales automation system that you have always wanted, so your input is vital.  Check out http://www.sugarcrm.com for more details on the latest product roadmap, support forums, detailed product information and much more.  We hope you find this a useful tool for building your business.  Enjoy!  The Sugar Team    -=Included Features=- An overview of the features in this release.   Leads New to 2.0, put standardized processes into practice to make sure all sales reps use the same, consistent lead qualification methodology. With the click of a button, quickly turn leads into opportunities. With the Sugar Sales Leads module, you can also easily manage rented lists and prospect data separate from your customer data.  Import and Export Import contacts and accounts from CSV (comma separated values) files.  Users can also easily export data from the system to CSV files.  Opportunities Sugar Sales provides a complete, yet easy-to-use Opportunities module.  From deal size to each contactâs role, from listing the competitors to tracking the lead source, sales reps can easily manage each sales opportunity to completion.    Accounts & Contacts With the Accounts & Contacts module, you can easily enter and update key account and contact information. Tracking and staying in touch with your customers is simply a click away.   Activity & Task Management Managing your customer interactions is at the heart of a sales automation application. Sugar Sales provides a simple and clean set of tools for quickly tracking tasks, phone calls, emails and meetings.   Notes & Attachments Easily keep notes on every contact, opportunity or account. New to v1.5, add file attachments to notes.    Home Screen  Focus on the right activities with a quick view of your top opportunities, pipeline, today's appointments and task list.  Dashboard  A picture is always worth a thousand words.  With the dashboard module, you can graphically view how your opportunities breakdown by sales stage or industry.  New to v1.5, you can customize the charts to display the data you want.  Administration  Easily manage all the users in the system, their passwords, user interface themes and more.    -=Future Planned Features=- What we're working on next.   Internationalization  Support for local and localized date and time display.   Accounts & Contacts Easily sync customer contact information between Sugar Sales and MS Outlook and Palm devices.   Activity & Task Management Plug-ins for PDAs and email applications that deliver a best-in-class open source solution for tracking key customer information in your PDA quickly and easily.  Notes & Attachments Ability to enter HTML notes. Also provide for full-text searching across text or HTML notes as well as most file attachments.  Dashboard  More dashboard charts including the ability to customize the charts by time ranges, deal size and more.   The latest release can be found here: https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=107819&package_id=116411
452325
Whoo oo oo ooo... Can you feel the force? Dreamforce Chief executive Marc Benioff today kicked-off Salesforce.com's fifth, annual Dreamforce conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco by citing customer numbers, growing developer and partner channels, and increased revenues as proof that Salesforce.com will force its way onto the software industry's table.â¦
419911
(InfoWorld) - Business Objects has started to roll out a full suite of business intelligence (BI) software in the form of an online service, initially for customers using Salesforce.com applications. The service allows customers to use Business Objects' BI tools without having to maintain the software themselves or buy extra servers on which to run it. Business Objects maintains a copy of each customer's data in its own data centers, and employees access the data and BI applications through a Web browser. Business Objects took itsÂ first steps in on-demand softwareÂ last April with the release of crystalreports.com, for sharing reports online. That service has attracted about 50,000 customers, the company said. The new service announced Monday, called Intelligence OnDemand, includes a broader set of applications for formatted reporting, running ad hoc queries and analysis, and displaying BI "dashboards" on a user's desktop. The first version of the service, available now, is for customers who have data stored in Salesforce.com's online CRM applications. Business Objects will load a copy of the customer's Salesforce data to its own data centers and build a data warehouse that customers can use to run their BI queries. The service is aimed at sales and marketing staff and business analysts at companies with a high volume of Salesforce data, and is the first in suite of similar services that Business Objects plans to roll out, the company said. It includes on-demand versions of its Crystal Reports, Crystal Xcelsius and Web Intelligence products. Business Objects has staked outÂ an early lead in on-demand BI, although SAS Institute and some smaller BI vendors are also getting into the game. Proponents of such services say they helps customers to cut costs because they don't have to manage applications themselves or buy servers on which to run them. Business Objects said it's new service will take the "heavy lifting" out of building and maintaining a data warehouse. The trade-off is that customers must trust a third party to look after and provide access to their sensitive company data. Business Objects representatives weren't available to give pricing for the new service, which will be unveiled at an event in California later on Monday to coincide with the start of Salesforce.com's Dreamforce user conference in San Francisco. Some more information is at Business Objects new On Demand Web site. The company also opened an online store on Monday where customers can buy external market information, such as sales data for other companies' products, and include it in their data analysis. The information comes from firms such as Thomson Financial, eBay, and Dun & Bradstreet. Customers can buy individual reports from $150, or sign up for a subscription. Â