Here are my notes from the 1st Keynote at Dreamforce, the annual Salesforce.com user convention.
I’m at the first keynote for Dreamforce, I just saw Robert Scobel hanging out in the blogger section. Fred from the Chronicle is in front of me sporting about 10k worth of camera gear. I’m not looking that cool with my Canon Rebel XT…
As the rock fades down the light show comes up. Projection screens on the ceiling.
Native apps for SalesForce being shown of, the major push for this show has been cloud computing. With their massive infrastructure this is a great transition for them.
Covers evolution of computing – mainframe, client/server, cloud, platform as a cloud. Windows Azure (he makes the vaporware call). Marc is a changed man, he doesn’t just shake down enterprise companies (he wants every size organization as a customer). The idea of customers as tenants is a new one to me – literally showing the chunk of the cloud as a database cylinder with cubes cut out for each of the tenants.
Force.com Sites: Many corporate websites are “teetering infrastructures”. Hosting now included with your SF.com subscription. Useful for both corporate sites or Intranets (other instances of “buying software” creeping in). Very cool – make updates in your Force application – it immediately propagates out to your website. 500k page views per month included free with Enterprise Edition of SF.com
Brain Melter: Using this functionality so that each sales rep gets a microsite, they make a change to their profile in SF.com and the website is automatically updated. Webinar registrations come right in to SF.com
Brain Melt #2: Write Facebooks apps in force.com – data objects are in Force.com and you use VisualForce to serve up code on Facebook. Showing off a recruiting app that updates Facebook automatically.
Starbucks using Ideas (Digg funtctionality from within SF- showing off Ideas app running on one enterprise, data fed to SF.com – results and closed loop over in Facebook. Arrrghhhh – brain melting again (#3).
Brian Melt #4: Force.com for Amazon Web Services – showing Card Lasso. Take a picture of a business card and it shows up in Salesforce.com very cool…
I’m speaking today at the 11:30 session on campaigns, right after the second keynote with Michael Dell (and supposedly an election day surprise). I’m also really excited by the 3rd keynote this afternoon with Malcolm Gladwell talking about his new book.