The Crunchies, a competition and award ceremony co-hosted by TechCrunch, GigaOm, VentureBeat, and Silicon Alley Insider, has Force.com as a finalist in the Best Enterprise category (together with Amazon, Google, Yammer and Zoho). It's fantastic to see the Force.com cloud computing platform recognized in the enterprise category - the speed with which everyone is moving applications to the cloud is phenomenal!

Please visit the Crunchies website to vote daily by January 5th!

And if you're a Salesforce admin interested in Force.com, don't forget to join the Admin to App Builder Challenge - you'll get free resources to build a Force.com app and then enter to win great prizes including a free trip to Dreamforce Europe 2009 in London!

Happy New Year!

(From The AppExchange Blog)

Exciting news! Starting this week, customers and partners can buy and sell AppExchange apps online anytime, anywhere, from a browser.

On Monday, we officially launched Force.com Checkout to a standing-room only audience at our Cloudforce Event in New York. With Checkout, it is easier than ever for customers to do business with salesforce.com and our partners. Customers now have a "one stop shop" where you can trial, pay for, start using, and manage subscriptions of Salesforce CRM and some of your favorite AppExchange partner apps.

Here is what CRM Buyer had to say:

“On Monday, Salesforce.com announced some of the remaining pieces of the grand puzzle when it introduced Checkout…a necessary component that, though its focus is financial rather than technical, enables the technology to fully function. It appears to me that with Checkout, Salesforce now has deployed a new closed-loop business process for cloud computing that starts with development, moves through distribution and sales, and culminates in the transaction and payment….This is cool stuff.” 

All Checkout partner applications are natively built and run on Force.com, which means you can rest assured they have the same security, reliability, and performance of applications from salesforce.com. And it's not just CRM applications. The majority of Checkout apps and new AppExchange apps are extending the SaaS model beyond just your sales, marketing, and customer service functions to other important areas in your company: human resources, IT, finance, operations, you name it. Here is the full list:

• Financials and accounting ERP from CODA
• Non-profit constituent relationship management from Convio
• Fleet management solutions from Datasul
• Order management ERP solutions from Glovia, a subsidiary of Fujitsu
• Staffing solutions from Jobscience
• Mobile expense reporting from Model Metrics
• Recruiting from Riptide
• Real estate management from Riptide
• Customer reference tracking from Riptide
• Risk management from StakeWare
• Financial relationship management from StraightThrough
• Productivity tools from Appirio
• Compensation management from Callidus
• Salesforce CRM administrator tools from DrivEnable

Existing customers, you can start using Checkout today from your dropdown menu inside the app. Everyone else, learn more here.

With the holiday season in full swing, I'm sure every Salesforce Admin has a wish-list of ways to extend their CRM and build new applications for their company. Whatever’s on yours—maybe a survey app, a recruitment portal, or maybe a project management tool—why not build it yourself? The Force.com platform makes it quick and easy: you can do it with skills you already have, inside of 60 days—and win great rewards for your innovation, including an all-expenses paid trip to Dreamforce Europe 2009 in London! Our Admin-to-Appbuilder Challenge Kit shows you how, with:

:: Quick-Start App Builder Tools: How-to books and tutorials, a step-by-step Webinar, and more—exactly what you need to build with Force.com using clicks, not code
:: Challenge Entry Guide: Full details on sharing your new app with the community on the AppExchange, entering it in the Challenge, and winning terrific prizes

Your company wins, too: Your apps deploy at no extra cost, because they’re built and run on Force.com—just like Salesforce CRM. So take your career skills, achievements, and hero-status to a whole new next level in the new year: Get your Admin-to-Appbuilder Challenge Kit today!

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I started my recruiting programs gig at salesforce.com in Summer 2005. Five years prior I had ridden a similar wave at Clarify where we were always looking in the rear view mirror at Siebel. In Fall 2005, Oracle acquired Siebel and in typical salesforce.com fashion, it was "game on". We launched a “Siebel Survivor” recruitment campaign targeting Siebel employees and hired more than 30 employees worldwide. 2 weeks ago, after we all drank more of the Dreamforce user community kool-aid, one of our Technology leaders sent me an email asking about doing it again. With all the gloom in today’s media and tech in general, it’s clear that we are in a unique position as a growing company and hiring “A-players”—in Technology, Sales, and more. What better way to let the Silicon Valley and San Francisco Tech Community know?

Starting Monday 11/17, we launched a mobile billboard campaign from San Francisco to San Jose Download RouteOverviewmap.pdf promoting “life changing careers; game-changing technology” and on Friday, November 21 we’ll have it in downtown San Francisco at our 1 Market Street headquarters during the lunch hour passing out recruiting swag and ice cream. I feel very fortunate to be a part of a company that sees this economic time as a tipping point in our favor (much like in 2001) and recruiting top talent as a competitive advantage.

At salesforce.com, we have been working very hard on developing Salesforce Winter '09 for its release in October. Winter '09 will be salesforce.com's third release this year and also marks our 27th release in less than 10 years, something we are very proud of. There will be more than 50 new features included in this release spanning all of our application product lines and the Force.com platform. However, none of this would have been possible without our customers. To date, salesforce.com customers have submitted more than 8,500 ideas and made more than 180,000 promotions on the Salesforce IdeaExchange, demonstrating that our customers are just as committed as we are to delivering the best SaaS and PaaS solution on the market today.

I wanted to highlight just a few features that were some of the most popular on the Salesforce IdeaExchange. In addition to some feature descriptions, I have also included short demos we filmed here at salesforce.com headquarters. Hope this sneak peak will get you as excited as we are about the upcoming innovations from salesforce.com. And don't forget, if you have ideas about new features you would like to see in future releases, submit them to the Salesforce IdeaExchange.

Salesforce CRM Features
1. Opportunity Splitting
The Opportunity Splitting feature addresses some of the shifts going on in sales organizations today. Deals are no longer closed by one person, many times it takes a team of people, and the Opportunity Splitting feature will enable companies to properly recognize and assign a percentage to each of the team members  that participated in a sale.

In addition, companies will now have clear insight into their pipeline by eliminating duplicate records and having reports that accurately reflect where the sales reps are spending their time.

The demo below really demonstrates why this is such a popular feature for salesforce.com customers.

Note - Pilot Only.  Please contact Salesforce Customer Support to have this feature enabled.  To enable Opportunity Splits, Team Selling must also be enabled

Opportunity Splitting Demo from Salesforce.com on Vimeo.

2. Campaign Influence
One of the most exciting features to come out with Winter 09 is a feature of Salesforce Marketing. Campaign Influence allows Salesforce CRM users to instantly see what campaigns influenced individual deals. This insight can help companies eliminate the most common challenge when it comes to marketing spend - "I know I am wasting half of my marketing budget, I am just not sure which half." Salesforce CRM users will be able to measure each marketing campaign on an opportunity by opportunity basis and understand what is working and what's not.

Check out the demo below to see how easy this feature is to use.

Campaign Influence Demo from Salesforce.com on Vimeo.

Force.com Platform-as-a-Service Features
1. Visualforce Email Templates
This feature will enable customers to take the power of Visualforce, the world's first user interface as a service, and use it to create any type of email template. Visualforce Email Templates will allow salesforce.com users to pull information from anywhere within their application and build dynamic email templates that can help improve response and open rates. In addition, salesforce.com users will be able to build and attach documents to email templates quickly and easily.

2. Schedule and Email Reports
The Force.com platform has really opened the door to technologies and features that were previously not possible in a Software-as-a-Service environment. And with more than 15,000 votes on the Salesforce IdeaExchange, the Schedule and Email Reports feature of Winter 09 is a popular example. This feature will enable salesforce.com customers to set up a schedule and email reports to the appropriate people at a specific time. For example, instead of having to manually run a report and send it out to the same people every week, the Schedule and Email Reports feature enables you to make that a completely automated process that you don't even have to think about.

 

The demo below really illustrate the convenience of this feature.

Schedule and Email Reports Demo from Salesforce.com on Vimeo.

 

Unreleased services or features referenced in this blog or other public statements are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all.  Customers who purchase salesforce.com applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available.