Salesforce.com today announced the immediate release of its salesforce.com Summer ‘04 product line to all 10,700 customers and 161,000 paying subscribers worldwide. The 16th generation of salesforce.com’s award-winning CRM service, Summer ‘04 delivers more customization, integration, globalization and state-of-the-art functionality. Summer ‘04 includes salesforce.com’s new Enterprise Edition 2.0, the most successful on demand offering for implementations ranging from small corporate divisions to multi-thousand-user, enterprise-wide CRM deployments.
Salesforce.com’s unique model immediately delivers all the benefits of Summer ‘04 to the entire salesforce.com customer base, at no extra cost, while ensuring that the integrity of existing customization and integration is preserved for every customer. Summer ‘04 is available in Personal, Team and Professional Editions, and now Enterprise Edition 2.0, allowing customers to choose the edition that is best for their size of implementation and enterprise. Introducing more than 100 new features, salesforce.com Summer ‘04 continues a tradition of product excellence that includes recently winning the Editors’ Choice award from PC Magazine for the third year, the Software Industry and Information Association (SIIA) Codie Award for Best CRM three years in a row and Infoworld’s Technology of The Year for Hosted Applications for two years in a row.
“Salesforce.com came through for us yet again with the Summer ‘04 release,” said Thomas Ducatelli, senior vice president, sales and business development, CompuCom, a leading IT services provider. “Every few months, they deliver meaningful advances that help improve our operations. These continuous enhancements mean that salesforce.com seamlessly evolves in lockstep with our business.”
Summer ‘04 includes:
» More Customization Capabilities: Summer ‘04 transforms salesforce.com from being an “in the box application” to a massively customizable CRM tool to satisfy a variety of customer needs. The ability to rename standard tab names, create custom fields, embed controls, and customize page layouts with drag and drop tools allows customers to fully customize salesforce.com just for them – while still being able to transparently upgrade as new releases become available. Summer ‘04 introduces a customizable “My salesforce.com” home tab to allow business administrators to easily tailor the salesforce.com home page for different user groups, giving each user quick access to the precise information and tools they need every time they log in. With the new Web Tabs feature, administrators can embed critical Web content, such as expense reports, maps or company research tools right into the familiar salesforce.com user interface.
» More Integration Options: Summer ‘04 allows salesforce.com to be easily integrated with all major enterprise and desktop applications. Summer ‘04’s enhanced Microsoft Outlook and Office Editions allows subscribers to run salesforce.com from within Outlook or access directly from Office applications. Over 3,000 members of the sforce developer community and over 100 independent software vendors now deliver solutions that integrate with salesforce.com through sforce, providing an unparalleled array of options for extending salesforce.com core functionality. Updated support for major application development tools from IBM, BEA, Borland, Microsoft or even open source standards (including Perl, Apache, and PHP) allow customers to build extensions to salesforce.com using the tools they already know.
» More State-of-the-Art CRM Functionality: Salesforce.com Summer ‘04 has over 1,000 state-of-the-art CRM features for managing and sharing customer information. Summer ‘04 includes a Customer Self-Service Portal that makes it easier than ever to create a place on a company’s Internet or Intranet site where customers or employees can go for service and support. Summer ‘04 makes it easy for organizations to track complex relationships where contacts are involved with multiple accounts. Analytics in Summer ‘04 now include additional drill-down and break-out options and an enhanced chart wizard that gives users greater control in designing custom charts.
» More Global Deployment Support: With customers in approximately 65 countries, salesforce.com goes beyond standard language and currency translation to meet the needs of the multinational enterprise. Summer ‘04 makes Outlook Edition and Office Edition available in all 11 languages supported by salesforce.com: Brazilian Portuguese, simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish and Swedish.
Included with Summer ‘04, Enterprise Edition 2.0 represents a major upgrade of salesforce.com’s award-winning product line targeted at large-scale, enterprise-wide CRM deployments. Built on the sforce client/service application platform, Enterprise Edition 2.0 provides the scalability, customization, integration, forecasting and globalization support for the largest and most complex on demand CRM deployments.
Enterprise Edition 2.0 features include:
» Enterprise VLO Architecture: Enterprise Edition 2.0’s VLO (very large organization) architecture represents a breakthrough design for tackling the needs of the largest on demand CRM deployments. VLO uses a multi-tenant design that allows each organization to have a secure, private, virtual database while still utilizing the full power of all available computing resources. A proprietary cache server stores all organization and user level preferences, allowing each page to be 100 percent customized in real time, even for the largest organizations. Finally, dynamic multi-tenant query optimization ensures that all queries are examined and statistically optimized, resulting in reliable performance and real-time reports.
» Enterprise Customization: Enterprise Edition 2.0 takes another leap forward with dozens of advanced features for customizing all layers of salesforce.com, including the data model, business logic and user interface. Developers can use the tools they know and love from sforce partners such as IBM, BEA, Borland and Microsoft and even open source to build new or composite applications. And unlike client/server software, these customizations are unaffected by upgrades, so that investments in customizations are never lost. Since the introduction of sforce, more than 25 percent of all Enterprise Edition customers have done advanced customizations to the salesforce.com underlying data model, demonstrating the deep customization now possible with on demand computing.
» Enterprise Integration: Enterprise Edition 2.0 updates the product’s innovative, advanced set of open Web services for integrating on demand CRM into an enterprise applications infrastructure with sforce 4.0. The new functionality in the sforce 4.0 Web service API takes the form of access to new objects, previously unavailable objects and related data operations; the new objects will appear automatically via the Enterprise WSDL and describe calls, and work transparently with existing data operations including SOQL, SOSL, create, update and retrieve. Complete schema and access information are available at http://www.sforce.com. Included in these web services are a SQL-like interface for querying data, a Google-like syntax to search any text entered into the system and a replication API for creating a mirror of all your salesforce.com data in a local database residing in the customer’s data center. Best of all, integrations remain intact even as customizations change or the service is upgraded.
» Enterprise Forecasting: Scheduled to be generally available in September 2004, Enterprise Edition 2.0 will deliver the most customizable on demand forecasting capabilities in the industry. With product-level forecasting, revenue stream forecasting, hierarchical forecast roll-ups, multi-tier management overrides, rolling forecasts and more, Enterprise Edition 2.0 is specifically designed to meet the advanced forecasting requirements of the largest enterprises.
» Enterprise Multi-National Support: Enterprise Edition 2.0 is the only CRM with dynamic translation – and the only CRM to provide on-the-fly translation not just for standard object and field names, but also for all customizations and picklist values. Users can even access the entire help system in their native language.
“When we looked for a CRM solution to be our enterprise-wide standard, salesforce.com was able to meet all of our requirements, including supporting multiple thousands of users across our 33 divisions,” said Mark Newhall, vice president, customer care and quality systems, Corporate Express. “That’s why we’ve made Enterprise Edition 2.0 a key part of our integrated sales process.”
