Nearly 30,000 attendees from across the globe joined the cloud at the biggest and best Dreamforce yet! This was also one of the largest nonprofit technology conferences that exists with hundreds of nonprofit attendees and dozens of nonprofit-themed sessions.
Salesforce.com made some major announcements, including expanding their goal of enterprise-wide collaboration, spinning off of the database layer and acquiring an open-sourced, development platform company.
For those of you who could not make it to San Francisco this year, I wanted to recap some of the top announcements from the conference. Here are my top 4:
1.Free Chatter– With Chatter Free, administrators can permit existing salesforce.com users to invite others within their organizations to utilize Chatter, in the same way Facebook users can invite friends to join their social networks. Chatter Free provides enterprise-wide social collaboration capabilities, including:
- Profiles
- Status Updates
- Real-Time Feeds
- File Sharing
- Groups
- Filters
- Invitations
- Chatter Mobile
- Chatter Desktop
This means that your ENTIRE CAMPUS can be on Chatter, not to mention volunteers and board members.
2.Database.com– Salesforce.com has unbundled the database layer of the Force.com platform to create a new standalone system that offers a point of entry to Salesforce.com’s Platform as a Service environment. The standalone Database.com capabilities are being offered to respond to the changing way in which applications and databases are being architected in a more pluralistic fashion in the Cloud. Marc Benihoff, Salesforce.com’s CEO, said that their goal is to democraticize database development and give their customers and partners another reason to expand their use of the Force.com platform.
What is the difference between Force.com and database.com?
Force.com is an application development platform. Database.com provides database services only. All access to the database is programmed through Salesforce.com APIs. Database.com does not include the Force.com development platform so there is no point-and-click application development, no home page, no chatter UI, no reports/dashboard, workflow, etc. All user interfaces must be built by a developer using their development platform of choice.
Learn more here: http://www.database.com/
3.Siteforce– A revolutionary way to build pixel perfect websites without code on Salesforce Sites.
Building websites today is slow and painful, with continual requests for new landing pages, new products and new campaigns.
Siteforce makes it easy to create new pages, manage content, and reuse pre-built components, all in real-time. And, websites built on Siteforce benefit from running on Salesforce.com’s trusted global infrastructure. Siteforce will be available in spring 2011.
4. Heroku Acquisition– Heroku is the fastest-growing Internet-based system for applications written in the Ruby programming language. The Heroku acquisition and Database.com are both geared to the new world of social, mobile apps and help will give Salesforce.com customers extreme agility in developing new types of custom applications.
Learn more here: http://heroku.com/
