Salesforce.com Adds Offline Perks To CRM

The Offline Edition targets mobile workers who need an up-to-date subset of their CRM data on the road. "Salespeople can take a briefcase of what they need for their trip, such as customer lists and contact lists, and open deals under development. [The Offline Edition lets them work with them, edit them, and sync all that up when they're back online," said Cary Fulbright, senior vice president of marketing and products at Salesforce.com, based here.

The product also supports Microsoft's .Net game plan, something Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff has promised.

Salesforce.com started off three years ago, promising to take the IT headaches out of CRM by offering the applications on an ASP model for a predictable price. It later added an enterprise version of the software for large corporations. Last winter, it promised an e-business suite expanding beyond CRM into accounts receivable, contract management, order management, invoicing and billing modules, due by year's end.

The Enterprise Edition, available since last year, costs $125 per user, per month and will include the offline version going forward. The Offline Edition is also available to users without the enterprise edition for $25 per user, per month.

In related news, Best Software last week unveiled Act 6.0 with an updated three-pane e-mail client, better integration with Outlook and enhanced management capabilities. With the mail integration, users can create a history on any message, perform mail merges using entries from either Lotus Notes or Outlook address books, and attach e-mail so it can be stored within Act's file system.

With Act 6, for example, users can run an Excel spreadsheet seemingly within Act itself and thus see the spreadsheet as well as related contact records at the same time, the company said. Act 6 is available now for $199.95 with volume discounts available.

Salespeople have long used Act for contact management, and Best Software is now beefing up those capabilities. Act had been offered by Interact Commerce, a company acquired two years ago by Sage Group. In a July reorganization, Best Software put Act and SalesLogix CRM software under a new CRM division. Best Software itself was acquired by Sage Group last year.

While both of these vendors are touting tight integration with Microsoft applications, they also face Microsoft's entry into low-end CRM later this year with its own offering see related story.