Salesforce.com Releases Spring Update

Salesforce.com Spring 'O4 now offers Custom Tabs. The capability--which allows administrators to add tabs of their own naming to the application's tab bar--actually comes by way of the new Studio function. Built into the CRM application, Studio lets non-programmers graphically create objects of data; associate relationships between objects; give the object a name, color and icon; and then place a tab to that object in the tab bar.

Spring '04 also adds three new standard tabs: The Products tab helps manage catalogs and price books. The Contracts tab enables users to track contract approvals, renewals and other contract-related issues. The Solutions tab implements business process management.

Other new features include group calendars, a public knowledge base that can be used for customer self-service as well as alerts reminding team members to update their opportunities and forecasts.

The built-in Translation Workbench can automatically convert all customized tabs and fields into 11 supported languages. Users simply select their language preference and, voila, "hotel room" becomes "piece d'hotel" for a hospitality company.

For BIOS-developer Phoenix Technologies, this language flexibility, along with the ability to customize and support the software-as-service from afar, proved to be big selling points. "We started with our office in China just as SARS and the Gulf War erupted, so we couldn't travel," said Clifford Jay Bell, CIO of the Milpitas, Calif.-based embedded systems company. Despite these obstacles, Phoenix managed to go live with the service in less than four months. "It's the only system other than e-mail that the executives talk about, so I know it's successful," he said.

Bell said his organization did not need the more advanced capabilities of sforce, which works through Web services APIs to integrate, modify and even build new applications out of salesforce.com CRM. Sforce 3.0 now supports enhanced custom objects that allow developers to manage relationships between objects, create custom layouts and add security. A new set of database-mirroring APIs provides integration with data warehouses, business analytics and other back-end systems. And the new sforce object searching language (SOSL) can manage and structure a variety of queries.

Pat Sueltz, president of technology, marketing and systems at the San Francisco-based ASP, told the San Francisco gathering that Salesforce now has 9,500 customers and 140,000 paying subscribers worldwide. Previously Sun Microsystems' vice president of professional services, Sueltz is credited with getting that organization to work more closely with resellers. She now faces the task of creating a reseller channel for a company that does little more than pay referral fees.

"I don't believe in the sell-to and sell-through model. That's not a partnership," Sueltz told CRN. "I will bring folks in, but I'm still getting my feet wet and working on how to do this."

Sueltz declined to comment on Salesforce's impending IPO, which is expected to raise more than $100 million. If reports printed April 9 by the San Francisco Chronicle are true, Salesforce's public offer could be delayed until May, at least. The paper cited private investors saying the SEC has sent a "half-dozen" comment letters to Salesforce, telling it to change how it accounts for sales commissions. So far, the accounting to-do has stretched a typically 60-day approval process to nearly four months.