Salesforce.com Welcomes Winter With Latest Release

Available Monday, the Winter' 04 release comprises both the flagship CRM application, Salesforce.com, and version 2.0 of the company's sforce application deployment software. The combination allows developers to host and store custom code for new applications, which Salesforce.com will then deploy and manage.

Also on Monday, Salesforce.com will announce that Bruce Culbert has joined the company from BearingPoint as senior vice president and general manager of global services. Salesforce said Culbert is responsible for "expanding the company's professional services offerings as well as cultivating and managing relationships with consulting services and integration partners worldwide." A company spokeswoman confirmed with CRN that Salesforce is beginning to build a channel network. Details are not available.

The Winter release of Salesforce.com CRM now includes active dashboards that can be customized to show key business metrics, realtime alerts, and new contract management feature to create and track service and purchase agreements. A new translation workbench delivers on-the-fly translations of 11 languages, such as Japanese, classic Chinese, Swedish and Italian,

With version 2.0 of sforce, developers and customers can build custom programs that Salesforce.com will subsequently host. One new customizing enhancement within the "on demand" application server, called sforce-controls, allows developers to create and extend user interfaces, custom content and forms.

Additionally, developers now can use sforce to create custom objects that control complex business processes. Sforce automatically generates a Web services interface for all custom objects. This interface, along with sforce 2.0 Web services APIs, enables objects to be integrated with back-end systems. Sforce now also provides the ability to set up rules and triggers to control workflow.

"Developers can use any development environment they are familiar with, store the custom application in Salesforce.com and, using the sforce platform, deploy it to any worldwide user base," said Kaiser Mulla-Feroze, director of product marketing, "We now let you build your own applications on demand and we host them for you."

ASP competitor NetSuite on Monday also announced similar customizing and hosting capabilties with the latest version of its Web-delivered software.