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Category: salesforce.com

Salesforce.com get friendly with Toyota

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Earlier this year the CRM vendor announced plans to build ‘Toyota Friend’, a private social network for Toyota customers and their cars.

This week Toyota unveiled the soon-to-be-launched Prius PHV plug-in hybrid in Japan, and with this, Toyota made ‘Toyota Friend’ available for the first time.

This vehicle will launch in Japan on 30 January 2012 and one of the features being offered free of charge is:

“Toyota Friend: A proprietary social networking service that provides charging and service reminders via “tweet”-like alerts. It also enables communication amongst Prius PHV users.”

Toyota Friend will be powered by Salesforce Chatter, Salesforce.com’s enterprise social messaging platform. Toyota Friend will connect Toyota customers with their cars, their dealership, and with Toyota.

Information that is expected to filter through the application include product and service data as well as maintenance tips. It is not a closed loop system, however, which could be key to marketers: customers can communicate to family, friends, and others through Twitter and Facebook. The service will also be accessible through smart phones, tablet PCs, and other advanced mobile devices.


Do.com – Chatter on Steriods

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Back in September we blogged on the new offering from salesforce.com: do.com.  At that time no one really knew much about what it would do, although with some educated guess work many people, us included, thought that it might be linked to Manymoon, which salesforce.com acquired.

Yesterday Marc Benioff tweeted “Check it out www.do.com! Now live.”

Cue a flurry of people trying to access the site.  Sadly it’s currently invite only and even those who have requested invite codes don’t all have them yet, but no doubt these will be forthcoming in the next few weeks.  Beta invites being trickled out slowly are immensely popular, with Spotify being one tech-firm who have made this model work for them in recent years; but early reports of those who do have access are very positive.

“Do.com is for anyone and everyone,” says Sean Whiteley, Salesforce’s Senior Vice President, in an interview with RWW. “We’re calling this a prosumer application. It’s the closest thing to a consumer app we’ve ever done.”

In December 2010 salesforce.com purchased the open cloud platform Heroku. Then yesterday, Salesforce.com unleashed do.com, which would seem to be a Heroku-based service, but integrated with Gmail (and presumably Google Apps) and indeed Outlook.

The concept is a social-cloud task management and collaboration platform, aimed at corporate and personal users. Think Chatter on Steriods.

Techcrunch report that do.com allows small teams and individuals to manage task lists, organize projects, and capture notes. The app allows you to assign tasks to other users (non-Do users can be sent an email to join), and in joint tasks, users can comment on tasks, accept and reject assignments and more.

Do also serves as an Evernote-like application and allows you to take notes from within the app, and assign yourself tasks from parts of your notes.

As Salesforce says, the app is meant to be used for both everyday consumer, list management use as well as for small group use within a business. So you can use the app to plan a dinner party or coordinate a marketing launch. Once you have a number of different tasks with shared users, you’ll see a Chatter-like Activity Feed, with real-time alerts and access to any comments on specific tasks.

The app is available via a web-based HTML5 app, as well as an iOS app. Do will also be available in the Google Apps Marketplace, Salesforce App Exchange, Chrome Web Store and LinkedIn App Marketplace. Any actions in one of these apps will be synced across your Do account. And Do is integrates with Dropbox so you can share files within the application from the file sharing service.

Do is free for now but Salesforce says eventually it will be adding paid features such as administrative controls and customization. For now, Do is still in private beta but will be opening up to larger audience over next few weeks, and will eventually open to the public in late November.

“A lot of people have referred to [Do.com] as a social productivity app,” Whiteley goes on, “but really it’s the set of things that you need to manage task lists – it can be your own task lists, or ones you share with a group of others. You can organize small or big projects, at home or with life or at work. Plus there’s some utilities such as easily taking notes and having them on all your devices – the basic sets of things you need to get work done with other people.”

Here’s some screenshots:

 


Cloudforce – Sold Out!

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Due to overwhelming demand, Cloudforce London 14 & 15 September is now FULL – but you can register to watch the live keynote online!

With more than 5,000 attendees, Cloudforce London is set to be the biggest Cloud Computing event of the year in the UK.

Join Marc Benioff and industry visionaries to learn how businesses are transforming themselves into Social Enterprises, using social and mobile technology to connect with customers, employees and partners.

The Cloudforce keynote will broadcast live on both Wednesday 14th and Thursday 15th September (content will be the same for both days).

Timings (all times are UK GMT)

09:30-10:00 Pre-show interviews and commentary with Peter Coffee

10:00-12:00 Keynote with Marc Benioff and special guests

To register to watch this live, please visit the Cloudforce Facebook event page.

To connect with ROD at Cloudforce to either discuss finding a role for you, or finding a candidate to fill a role, please fill out our quick form on our website or phone us on 020 8123 7769.


salesforce builds something special

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salesforce.com are going to be building something quite special, the cloud giants have just unveiled plans for their new campus in the Mission Bay neighbourhood of San Francisco.

The campus will consist of 8 buildings spread over 14 acres, with 2 million feet of office space, and will include spaces for cafes and other businesses.

The whole thing was designed by Mexico City architecture firm Legorreta + Legorreta, and has a tropical feel to it – lots of purple and pink.

“Our new campus will be a place where our employees and the community can connect, collaborate and be inspired by the world around them,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. “Legorreta + Legorreta’s stunning design gives physical evidence of salesforce.com’s philosophy of innovation.”

Construction will begin in a year, but Salesforce isn’t saying how long it will take or how much it’ll cost.

Here are some pictures of their brightly coloured new venture…

 

 


Universities Encouraged to Embrace Emerging Technologies

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Resource on Demand, today sent out a press release encouraging Universities to embrace emerging technologies, like cloud computing.

You can read our press release below…

(London, UK) Leading cloud recruitment firm, Resource on Demand, is encouraging universities to introduce industry-recognised modules in a bid to increase the employability of graduates.

Theresa Durrant, Operations Director at Resource on Demand (ROD), said:

“Higher Education Institutions need to further their commercial partnerships with organisations and platforms in order to give under-graduates the edge in a crowded job market. Through offering modules in contemporary technology, such as cloud computing, graduates will enter the job market better equipped for the task in hand.”

From September 2012, universities in England will be allowed to raise tuition fees up to £9,000 per year and ROD are arguing that this presents a great opportunity for Universities to invest in emerging technology markets.

Theresa Durrant and ROD, are pioneers in the cloud recruitment market and are blazing the way for graduate opportunities, she said:

“We are currently seeing graduates enter the job market with no certification at all, which is the bare minimum they would need to work with a platform such as salesforce.com.  There is then additional training they need to undertake before they can begin to work, which we hope can be avoided in the future.”

One of the few universities to embrace Cloud Computing is Aberdeen University who offer a MSc/PgDip in ‘Cloud Computing’, but ROD is encouraging places like Aberdeen to expand their offering.

Theresa Durrant added:

“Universities can use recruitment companies, like ROD, to gauge the direction that technology is moving in, and adjust their courses accordingly – at the moment recruiters tend to be a dirty word – but we believe there is a strong partnership that if forged could help graduates, Universities and the job market.”

Lee Durrant, ROD MD, said:

“Our suggestion is that Universities take advantage of the free tools that salesforce.com offer, such as developer accounts, wide-ranging online training, and free social collaboration tools.  The culmination of this is the student undergoing the certification process as an integral part of their course and leaving University with usable and employable skills. Providing a vocational and work experience led qualification that meets both the industry and direct company employment needs.”

ROD launched in Feb 2009, and are now recognised as a leading light in the Cloud eco-system.  They were one of the first UK recruitment companies to focus purely on Salesforce.com and Cloud recruitment.

 


New video: All about Resource on Demand

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In this video ‘Resource on Demand’ Managing Director, Lee Durrant, talks about ROD, which is leading the way in Cloud Recruitment in the UK. Lee explains more about the company, what we do, who we help and how we have adopted a new business model – making recruitment an affordable option for organisations all over the UK & Ireland.


Chatter at the Superbowl

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The Superbowl is billed as ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’ by the NFL and so for salesforce.com it was the natural occasion to showcase chatter – and make their TV advertising debut!

The two adverts that were shown to an audience of millions were:

salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff explained the process on the Cloudblog which you really should read:

Making it to the Super Bowl is all about hard work. The athletes have spent their entire careers training for this event—and now hope that the right mix of talent, dedication, and luck will win them a ring. In their own way, companies advertising during the most important spot of the year face a similarly labor-intensive process that requires selecting the best agency, testing concepts, and hoping the ad appeals to consumers in a memorable and meaningful way. It takes time.

Time was something I did not have. But from the moment will.i.am of The Black Eyed Peas and I first talked about collaborating on an advertisement for the biggest Sunday in television, I knew it was something that we had to do. Combining the reach of the Super Bowl with the creative genius and vision of will.i.am would be a big win for salesforce.com — and the perfect showcase for our new service Chatter.com. We couldn’t afford to fumble the opportunity.

So I called our chief marketing officer Kendall Collins and told him what I wanted to do. “Next year, right?” he asked. Not quite—this year’s game in 90 days, I said. “Impossible,” Kendall told me.  And I knew we had to do it.

That’s because I knew we could pull it off. We live in an exciting time when the right technology redefines what’s possible. Last year I wrote about the Facebook Imperative describing the shift to the next phase of cloud computing, which I call Cloud 2. With Cloud 2, we’ve moved beyond making Internet applications that are easy to use, and progressed to a cloud computing model that’s inherently social (like Facebook), open and mobile – working on revolutionary devices like Apple’s iPad.  Chatter, which we released in June, is at the heart of our effort to bring Cloud 2 to the enterprise.

Already, more than 60,000 of our customers have deployed Chatter — helping their employees come together in unexpected ways to share ideas, improve productivity and accomplish the impossible. I’ve never seen any product adopted this quickly in the enterprise.  But a growing number of companies that were not our customers have been telling us they want these social collaboration capabilities too. And so, we launched Chatter.com, opening it up to an entirely new audience of 65 million businesses worldwide. Now any employee can create a free, secure, private social network to help their company collaborate, innovate, and grow.

We had to tell this story. What better way than during the biggest advertising event of the year? But we had only three months to create content, tag lines, music, animation—all with teams who had never met. We had never even done a TV spot before — let alone the mother of all spots.

New challenges require new approaches. And we didn’t want to take the traditional ad agency approach.  In this case, the agency was the artist. We worked with Dipdive, LLC – what will.i.am calls a social media lifestyle agency that has a totally revolutionary approach to content, brands, social media and art. And we decided to manage the entire creative process in Chatter – meshing, on the fly, each person’s distinctive approach to achieve the impossible .

Our corporate marketing team, will.i.am and Dipdive  used Chatter to brainstorm and surface the best ideas. We shared documents, scripts, compositions – all in the cloud. We rapidly iterated on everything: the tag line; our animated character Chatty, a helpful superhero cloud; and the awesome sound ID for Chatter.

The most powerful part: We did it all from different locations, using all kinds of devices. Teams were in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, Tokyo and the UK. will.i.am approved things from his BlackBerry while in Paris. I did everything the same way I run my company—from my iPad. We were never in the same room, or even on a conference call. There were no email threads, no excuses for not getting documents. (As will.i.am said: “This is 2011, there’s no time for that!”) We cut a process that usually takes eight months down to 90 days. And, it was insanely fun. You can even watch a video on how we did it:

If we were able to do an ad for the Super Bowl in 90 days, imagine what we can achieve 10 years from now as we embrace and evolve this technology. When “impossible” loses its meaning, we strive for a whole new level of what’s possible.

With Chatter, anyone can do impossible things as a team.  I encourage you to check out Chatter, and experience ‘The End of Impossible.’


Spring ’11 on the horizon

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Though it may not feel that way right now spring is on the horizon. The Spring 11 release that is.

The next release of Salesforce.com (aka Spring 11) is scheduled to roll out in late January and February (check http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/status/ for the exact schedule) and there will be a preview Webinar on January 18th (6am PST and repeated again at 10am PST) to discuss some of the platform features that will be included in the upcoming release. Some of the features that will be discussed and demoed during the webinar are:

1) Revised Apex Governor limits: A topic near and dear to all Force.com developers. The governor limits have been simplified in Spring 11 and we’ll be discussing some of the key changes during the webinar. Among other changes, the Trigger context for governor limits has been eliminated in Spring 11. There is now just one context and a single set of governor limits for all Apex code – whether its written in a trigger, a VF controller, a test class or a web service.

2) Chatter triggers: Come hear about the new Apex triggers that you can write on the FeedItem and FeedComment objects.

3) Field Sets and dynamic Visualforce : Letting Administrators pick and choose which fields to display on a Visualforce page via config (no code changes required). Being able to determine which fields should be displayed on a page at runtime. If that sounds remotely interesting, come find out more during the webinar. ISV developers should be especially excited about the new Field Sets feature.

4) Visual Process: Based on the sold-out sessions at Dreamforce, the Visual Process tool is hot! And rightly so. It allows you to develop complex wizard type UI to support business processes like call scripting, lead creation, insurance quotes etc. via a sophisticated drag-and-drop WYSIWYG tool. No need to write a single line of code. You can also embed a Visual Process in a Visualforce page using a simple <flow:interview> tag. This allows you to develop cool mashups and expose Visual Process flows to Sites, Customer and Partner Portals.

5) Criteria based sharing: The ability to share records based on field values (instead of record ownership). This is one of the most eagerly awaited platform features and its GA in Spring 11.

Sign-up for the webinar here.


Dreamforce 2010 review

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Last week, the cloud computing event of the year hit San Francisco with a mighty force and as a company with more than a passing interest in Salesforce.com, Dreamforce was of huge interest to us (we watched online along with a host of other people.)

Thousands of people joined together to innovatively learn about the future of computing and how it can successfully transfer their business into this new era of the second cloud. Through connecting with others, inspirational talks and practical seminars, Dreamforce aimed to provide the complete package to get your company ahead of the game.

Undoubtedly a highlight of the conference was the networking opportunities (for those who were there), with over 20,000 like-minded people; Dreamforce was the perfecting hunting ground for forging new, long-lasting friendships and business relationships.

This year the Dreamforce App was introduced which made networking more effective and concentrated. By updating you attendee profile on the App, conference goers were able to meet, greet and gain information from people specialising in specific topic areas of interest. After all, Dreamforce is about community innovation and so building exciting business relationships was central to the conference.

Bill Clinton joined to tell of his experience at being a president in changing times. He gave insight into his views on globalisation and the worlds growing independence. Having led a country into enormous economic growth and prosperity, Bills inspirational talk gave vision and also practical application theory leaving us with plenty to chew on and consider implementing back in our own company. Whatever your background, this presentation gave us all something to think about.

Then Dreamforce got practical. With over thirty hands on workshops, from ‘Have It Your Way: Customize Your Org to Fit Your Business’ to ‘Driving Collaboration with Chatter,’ there was a program to suit every need and answer every question. The sessions encompassed the most up to date information as well as workable strategies and tips for your business, in order that you were enabled to leave with the relevant skills needed for moving forward.

Finally, Stevie Wonder, the man who is practically the definition of success, topped everything off by performing some of his most famous songs at the Global Gala getting everyone to their feet dancing and singing along – if you were there anyway.

All in all, a very successful time seemed to be had by all and we most certainly came away (virtually) with lots to think about and lots to mull over.


More people will hand in their notice this week than during any other week

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Today we released figures to the National press showing that more employees will hand in their notice this week than during any other week in the year.

The full press release is below.  We’d love to hear your thoughts on this, or if you’re going through a similar situation yourself.

Press Release

Figures from Cloud Recruitment Company ‘Resource on Demand’ were released today and show that more employees will hand in their notice this week than during any other week of the year, with a staggering 37% of the years total transpiring this week alone.

Year on Year statistics gathered by Resource on Demand show that 37% of resignations occur in the third week of September and 24% happen during the first week of February. Both of these bouts occur 4-weeks after the end of traditional holiday seasons.

This research also shows that whilst many career changes are triggered following these key holiday periods, it takes candidates on average 4 weeks to job hunt and attend interviews, then a further 4 weeks to work their notice – meaning that the majority of post-summer resignations only start their new roles at the beginning of November.

Lee Durrant, MD of Resource on Demand, said:

“This week will see hundreds of thousands of people handing in their notice across the UK & Ireland. The catalyst is often the Summer break, people return from their time away looking to progress or alter their career path. After mulling it over on a beach, job hunting, applying, interviewing and working their notice, many candidates will naturally opt to this week hand in their notice and so a ‘merry-go-round’ of the jobs market will begin”.

A recent (July 2010) study by the Institute of Leadership and Management has revealed that 40% of workers do not in actua fact return from their holidays feeling more relaxed.

Lee Durrant added:

“It is incredible that over half of all new jobs are triggered by the two key holiday seasons, but in many ways it is also unsurprising. The time away from our desks helps us to consider our options and evaluate our careers. Our advice is that if you are not enjoying your job, maybe it is time to look for a role that you will enjoy. This may include training to reach that goal, but it is worth the time that you invest into it.”

Resource On Demand (ROD) is a market leader in providing recruitment services on a subscription basis to the salesforce.com and Cloud Computing industry. Assisting companies looking to recruit talented people with salesforce.com experience and certification on permanent, contract or temporary assignments.