Salesforce.com Upgrades Its Flagship Products

Salesforce.com today unveiled major upgrades to its two main products at its first annual Dreamforce user conference being held this week in San Francisco. Winter '04 is the newest version of its hosted CRM solution, and sforce 2.0 is the latest version of the company's on-demand application server.

"We have focused in on three major areas with the release of Winter '04: greater CRM functionality, improved integration capabilities, and robust globalization features," says Kaiser Mulla-Feroze, direct of product marketing at Salesforce.com.

Mulla-Feroze notes that included in the 1,000 CRM features found in Winter '04 are integrated active dashboards and workflow automation capabilities. Real-time alerts deliver automatic notifications of critical business events, while contract management, part of the product's new operations and finance module, creates and tracks customer contracts.

"And in terms of integration, we have added integration capabilities at both the desktop and application level," Mulla-Feroze says. "So now users can integrate Salesforce.com with smaller desktop applications like Word and Excel, as well as with other larger applications."

In addition Mulla-Feroze says that the globalization capabilities continue in a direction Saleforce.com has been taking for some time. "From the beginning we have been all about global capabilities for multinational companies," he says. The new global translation workbench provides on-the-fly language translation and automatically summarizes data and reports for managers in the language of their choice, according to Mulla-Feroze.

The company also unveiled the latest version of its application server, sforce 2.0, at the conference. "Using our sforce on-demand application server means that customers can create custom programs designed to fit their unique business needs and host those applications on the Salesforce.com server, without ever having to own any hardware or keep any software on site," Mulla-Feroze says.

Both Winter '04 and sforce 2.0 will be made available on November 24, according to Mulla-Feroze, and like all other Salesforce.com upgrades, this one will be equally as seamless. "The moment we switch it on, the new versions will be available to the more than 150,000 users of Salesforce.com instantly," he says.

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