Slashdot Mirror

Two examples:

1. SalesForce charges a premium to enable encrypted-at-rest for your data. This means the company is charging to protect your data from possibly being compromised by SalesForce's own employees.

Encrypted at rest means your information is secured when offline, and the key is always secured. If not, and they wanted to compromise it, they still could. It’s more about protecting against a disk walking away, getting lost, mishandled, returned to the manufacturer etc. after it’s no longer needed but still containing sensitive info. That or you just need it for legal/contractual reasons.

Two examples:

1. SalesForce charges a premium to enable encrypted-at-rest for your data. This means the company is charging to protect your data from possibly being compromised by SalesForce's own employees.

2. ZenDesk basic plans allow user passwords to be any five characters. No policy can be applied requiring more digits or types of characters (alpha, case, numbers, punctuation, etc.) unless your organization subscribes to the "Professional" or "Enterprise" level. Zendesk is using the threat of end-users having their accounts compromised to encourage customers to pay extra for the ability to enforce safe password policies.

It seems that some public cloud proprietors intend to mimic real-world ghettos. If customers want the cheapest rent for their cloud service, then thugs and criminals may break in and steal your data. Pay higher rent and you get protection.

I just read an article about "telehealth" by a local health care provider. I'd link the article, but they just send me this newsletter via snail mail and it does not appear to be online.

4 years ago they started doing this when a flood cut their patients off from services and they've been expanding it ever since. It mentions many benefits such as saving time transporting patients who may be having a stroke.

They cite a Harris Poll which (shockingly to me) showed that 74% of millennials would prefer seeing a doctor virtually and 71% of them want to use apps to share their health data.

The State of the Connected Patient - 2015 (Press Release)

Download here

(I guess you can download it, but they want your email, phone and company name first. I didn't.)

In other news, Sensenbrenner vehemently opposed, and [is] still committed to repealing the ACA

Router failures shouldn't cause loss of data in any appreciatable amount. Enterprise level organizations should have automatic failover routers in place. This was far more than a simple router failure...so the real question should be: should companies be allowed to lie to their customers about major technical issues?

Why is that so hard to believe? I can see how a core router failure could lead to data loss. Router failed, backup router didn't work (if you don't do failover testing, you don't know that your backup is really ready to take over the load: "oh oops, the firmware on the fiber interface card on the secondary crashes under heavy load"), split-brain leads some systems to fail over to secondary, now you've got transactions hitting primary and secondary databases concurrently, possibly with no way to reconcile them, hence data loss. It may have failed over and back several times, making data recovery even harder.

My company made a conscious decision to delay failover until an engineer decides to flip the switch to prevent this kind of split-brain situation, we'll take the 30 - 60 minute hit on downtime, but that costs us a lot less than it would cost Southwest.

Of course, even letting an engineer decide when to failover doesn't prevent problems, just ask salesforce

I'm confused.
SAP and Salesforce both have ERP products.

https://appexchange.salesforce...
http://go.sap.com/product/ente...

I also ditched a good job thanks to a move to Salesforce Apex. An awful language. I wrote a document about the experience. I think it's a good laugh.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1piRkevGOfv1GFcqFb5fRFs4yUIFMK9a-mRW82EJzMQ8/edit?usp=sharing

That should be required reading for anyone considering a job working with the terrible Salesforce platform. It is half-baked and fails in so many ways it is ridiculous. The only reason anyone uses that steaming pile of shit is because it smells good to C-level executives. Oooh! Look at the demo! Shiny stuff and tons of buzzwords!

Some of the issues you wrote about are better now, but 95% of it is spot-on. Specifically, governor limits have been relaxed the past year or so but the 100 query limit is still firmly in place. The Winter 2015 release has a few things that are nice in the Salesforce world, but laughable in the real world. They are still years behind the rest of the industry. Salesforce developers are still at the whim and mercy of the Salesforce company to implement things that make them more productive.

Also, you missed the #1 missing feature: debug mode. I can debug my way through a Spring web application. I can debug through ASP.NET. Shit, I can debug assembler. Salesforce? Hahahahaha. No stepping through code for you! No inspecting variables for you! No breakpoints! Want to see the stack trace? Too bad! This alone is a deal breaker for me.

This is the same problem we've always had, whether its someone's website on a shared host or a colo server. You need to back it all up and doing a naive dump of the entire thing will take too long and cost too much in bandwidth, so you take a dump of the entire thing once (preferably when you have the thing you're deploying locally) and then take incremental backups from there.

I agree with this approach. If you can get an initial full backup and then use something like RSync with a cron job to handle the incrementals, that would be ideal.
Some info regarding RSync with EC2 is here: http://stackoverflow.com/quest...

One of the worst offenders when it comes to data exports has to be salesforce.com. If you delete a single custom object they charge you upwards of $10K USD to recover your data: https://help.salesforce.com/HT...
Even worse, you get it back in CSV format. My former employer decided to go with them for their entire operation (sales, marketing, and production/warehouse). I left around the time they started implementation, and it was a complete nightmare!

People don't want Microsoft on their tablet.

The only people that care are the ipad buyers who want to buy an ipad because its an ipad, and few could even articulate why they want an ipad instead of an alternative, except that they "know" that's the one they want.

The people buying droid tablets largely don't care that its droid. Sure, some of US do, but that's beside the point.

All true.

MS can easily take a bite out of the android market by competing on price, if they want.

Um, maybe. I guess anyone will buy anything if it's cheap enough, but Win8 is a hard sell.

MS can also go after the premium market with the competitive advantage the Surface 2 Pro has -- the ability to run windows / desktop apps.

And there you lost me.

And -yes- this IS something there is a market for. One company I work with for example has all it's outbound reps using laptops to enter sales etc. The reps are clamoring to switch to a tablet for portability etc. Sure the point of sale system vendor could come around with a web interface or ios/droid client at some point, but today that doesn't exist.

There are those who would disagree. If your sales software is a thick client bound to Windows, you're about a decade behind the times, chum. Modern sales interfaces are html based, and friendly (or, at least, no more unfriendly) towards tablets as they are laptops.

So the surface pro works for them today. Microsoft can go after and capture that market, even at 'premium' prices.

They can make all the products they want, but the software that people want runs on an OS owned by someone else.

What software is there that's exclusively on ios or droid that you think "people want to run"? Reality is people don't care about that. ipad has its brand name cachet, and droid has the open community, but the average person? Doesn't REALLY care; and the business user? Could very well see a lot of advantages to windows tablets if microsoft puts out a competent product.

Um, again, as many have said, if Microsoft had come out with this several years ago, they might have made a dent in the market. But these days? The scenario only applies to legacy systems. It's a new product intending to fill a shrinking niche. Not where a successful company wants to be.

Salesforce don't like the whole pay for it once and keep it model. They like the pay once a month (SaaS) model. They are also pretty shitty at giving data back when you want it. You can have it but it's a bastard to get it out.

Salesforce makes SQL access difficult (or impossible). They can switch to Postgres without changing their web platform and then open the DBs for reporting, read replication, and sell write access. SQL is still the power-tool of enterprise integration.

False. Salesforce has one of, if not the best, API for any cloud solution. Using their API, SOQL (not pure SQL) is easy and straight forward.

I'm not affiliated with Salesforce, other than a delighted customer where my company of 20k employees utilize their service. In fact, I've personally developed SQL table replication* using SOQL, and it isn't that hard.

* Not "true" database replication, but functionally the same.

We all thought google was a fad, the same way Lycos and Altavista, and even Yahoo were before them. Google was easily the third major contender for the crown of most used search engine. Social networking has had about three leaders so far. There's been friendster, Myspace, and now Facebook. Unless there's a sudden shift in the way Americans behave (because lets face it, we're the only ones that matter), then Facebook is not going away anytime soon. The problem being that old people never change, and they're all finally migrated away from Yahoo groups. And it's not like that was an easy task mind you. Do you have any idea how many granbabies needed to be born, or how many teenagers had to beg their grandparents to get on Facebook for that to happen? Christ, it's almost unfathomable. That said, the market is about as big as it's going to get. At least domestically. So anyway, good luck getting people to change. Especially old people.

Take a look at what salesforce.com and data.com .data.com are doing with Facebook, and other social sites. This is where it get's interesting, or scary.

http://trust.salesforce.com/

Prior to the iPhone's app store, I can't think of one instance where that term was ubiquitous among non-techheads. Actually, come to think of it, I can't think of any instance where it was ubiquitous among techheads.

What - the word "app"? or the phrase which means "a store which sells apps"? Because the one was certainly in common use, and the other is obviously no more or less than descriptive, and so obvious that Apple wasn't even the first to use it.

Why a shitload? One is enough. Here:

December 12, 2006 — Salesforce.com [NYSE: CRM], the technology and market leader in on-demand business services, today announced its AppStore vision and monetization strategy for the AppExchange marketplace.

So: dear Apple, no, sorry, you cannot trademark "app store". You can't create a "Salesforce AppStore", but you can create an "Apple App Store" or an "Amazon AppStore" or any other sort of app store called an "app store".

http://www.salesforce.com/company/news-press/press-releases/2006/12/061212-1.jsp

Gonna eat the shit now, fanboy?

In case you didn't notice, Appz is rather unlike App. Also that domain is based around the concept of "Warez", more than a shortened form of Application.

In any case the idea and name AppStore was around before Apple's App Store and was also a place to buy Applications from.

Realism time - at first App Store seems generic. But when, before the Apple "App Store" launched, did anyone ever use the term "app" outside of a restaurant?

Yes.

That's the key thing. The slang if you will, is something Apple developed.

No they didn't, they didn't even come up with AppStore.

• Phi Schiller, SVP Marketing, Apple
• Ron Johnson, SVP Retail, Apple
• John Connolly, Technology Director, Chicago Public Schools
• John Halamka, MD, Beth Israel
• Marc Benioff, Chairman & CEO, Salesforce.com
• Howard Shane, PhD, Children's Hospital
• Shannon Des Roches Rosa

AppStore is not the search term I used, I used "App Store" as used by Apple. Search engines return exact matches, and my statements were true and complete. Your citation isn't as authoritative as you might think, since that web page in not on the Internet Archive prior to September 15, 2008; however, I found that eWeek had a citation for the press release from 2007 that's valid. I was cautious about accepting your URL, only because I have seen "press releases" altered before.

SalesForce used the term AppExchange on their website and the search for "Appstore" on their website is rather telling: It appears that they used AppStore internally and in press releases in a manner similar to the way Microsoft used Chicago as the working name for Windows 95, but they never used the term in commercial manner (product or service). It is telling that they did not feel the need to clarify "Apple App Store" in the many references to "App Store" and "AppStore" which refer to purchasing Iphone/iPod applications from Apple. Prior use of the term does not prevent or invalidate registration, and I do not know if this evidence of one prior use would be sufficient to convince a judge that the term is generic.

AppStore is not the search term I used, I used "App Store" as used by Apple. Search engines return exact matches, and my statements were true and complete. Your citation isn't as authoritative as you might think, since that web page in not on the Internet Archive prior to September 15, 2008; however, I found that eWeek had a citation for the press release from 2007 that's valid. I was cautious about accepting your URL, only because I have seen "press releases" altered before.

SalesForce used the term AppExchange on their website and the search for "Appstore" on their website is rather telling: It appears that they used AppStore internally and in press releases in a manner similar to the way Microsoft used Chicago as the working name for Windows 95, but they never used the term in commercial manner (product or service). It is telling that they did not feel the need to clarify "Apple App Store" in the many references to "App Store" and "AppStore" which refer to purchasing Iphone/iPod applications from Apple. Prior use of the term does not prevent or invalidate registration, and I do not know if this evidence of one prior use would be sufficient to convince a judge that the term is generic.

This is not about the word app -- it's about the phrase App Store (or appstore, or any permutation involving spaces between the two words and capitalization).

A phrase that Apple is not the first user of in commerce.. in other words, that Apple does not have exclusive use of.

Salesforce.com used it first back in 2006 to refer to a product,

AppStore will give customers a single source for trying, buying and deploying AppExchange applications

Now you tell me.... how different Amazon's product really is in type from Salesforces' ? :)

The Apple App Store opened in March 2008. If you do an Internet search for the term "App Store" prior to that you have a very hard time finding any legitimate results. (Google really needs to fix their date search, and Bing and Yahoo! were worse) I didn't find any, but going through lots of results manually is problematic. It is entirely possible that they actually did coin the term - so yes, seriously.

Bullshit.

'Trademark law states that any potential mark violations must be enforced."

Too bad Apple is SEVERAL years late to the game.

http://www.salesforce.com/company/news-press/press-releases/2006/12/061212-1.jsp

Trademark made INVALID as it has existed in that particular ecosystem well before Apple filed.

Hey, Jobs, tell your lawyers to back off before I fuck up yet a FOURTH lawsuit for you in my amicus.

direct link to the sales force press release

The State of Minnesota uses salesforce.com as well: http://www.salesforce.com/customers/education-non-profit/minn-deed.jsp

Our nonprofit organization has been using Salesforce as our CRM since 2006, and Common Ground since last summer.

Two issues you raised... One, the reporting/query question. The canned reports in Common Ground are good starting points and they're ridiculously easy for even the most novice user to configure to an organization's own needs. Next month, Salesforce is rolling out significant improvements to their reporting/dashboard interface, and of course Common Ground users immediately enjoy that benefit. I don't know when you last looked at Common Ground/Salesforce, but if it was any longer than a couple of months ago, your information is probably out of date. We get updates from Salesforce 3 times a year, and then Convio is updating the nonprofit-specific functionality on top of that.

For example, Convio's last update to Common Ground included new direct market tools built on the Campaign object in Salesforce. This allows us to query the database and build segments of constituents in a way that just isn't possible with Salesforce out-of-the-box. Being able to build segments based on exclusion data, for starters. And also point and click easy for the end user. It's nice for the geeks reading this to have reporting tools that take a comp sci degree to use, even better when the tools are easy enough to use that program staff can do it themselves. From where I'm sitting, that saves the organization a lot of money. No one in our org has had to get on a plane to South Carolina to learn how to use our CRM and get the most out of its data.

Second issue is around resources/data load. That's the beauty of Common Ground. It's the Salesforce platform. Doesn't matter if you're doing an export from your dual, quad-core Xeon box or from my iMac. We routinely export tens of thousands of records. The GUI only displays 2,000 records in detail in its report (but you can display roll-up data on hundreds of thousands of records at once) and then you click a button to export the data to Excel, which takes maybe 30 seconds on a slow day. It's just downloading a file like any other. Crunching the export happens on the Salesforce side, not locally. Check out http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/status/ and how many transactions Salesforce deals with on a daily basis.

I do have to admit that complex joins in reporting are a challenge in Salesforce, and that's probably what you heard. It's really good on parent - child, and even parent - child - grandchild relationships. It can get dicey with cousins. But then if that's a deal breaker there are 3rd party reporting tools, some offered at discount to nonprofits, that bridge the gap. Pretty much anything that Salesforce/CG doesn't do there's an application that will help.

I think that management had a rosy picture in their minds, that was dispelled by the cruel, harsh light of reality. The original post appears to only live in Google's cache. Unclassy.

Here's the full link from the DDO forums front page (obtained from google cache):

Get More FREE Turbine Points with New Offer Wall!
April 12, 2010
Want to get your hands on more Turbine Points? Visit my.ddo.com/getpoints, log in, and check out the latest offers from our friends at SuperRewards. Simply complete a qualifying offer and SuperRewards will credit your account with Turbine Points* to use in the DDO Store! This new feature is just another way for players to get points in addition to earning them in-game or buying them directly. Unlike earning or buying points, however, players may complete offers right on the website and do not need to be logged into the game.

This new feature is an addition to our current DDO Store system and does not replace the existing ways you already get points. We will continue to add new offer providers and payment methods in the coming months - if you have a preferred payment method, we’ll probably support it. For now, the fastest and easiest way to get guaranteed points is still to buy them in the DDO Store directly from Turbine.

Enjoy!

Frequently Asked Questions:

Q. What is the offer wall?
A. The offer wall at my.ddo.com is a feature that allows players to earn Turbine Points for completing offers from various Offer Vendors.

Q. What’s an offer?
A. An offer is an advertisement for a product or service that typically requires you to perform an action. That may include registering for a newsletter, signing up for a subscription service, or buying a product. Offers may also include market research such as surveys, online focus groups, and more.

Q. Do I have to do this?
A. Of course not! This system is provided as a service to those who would like more Turbine points and who prefer not to pay for them in the traditional fashion.

Q. What about my personal information? Is it safe?
A. We do not share any personal information with the offer vendor other than an anonymous unique ID and an e-mail address for your receipt to be sent to. This information is not transmitted unless you participate in the offer wall system. You may be (and probably will be) asked to provide additional information to complete an offer. Turbine has no way to control what happens with that information or how it is handled. We recommend that you use your discretion when signing up for offers. As always, protecting your privacy requires vigilance.

Q. Where is SuperRewards’ Privacy Policy located?
A. Online at http://www.superrewards-offers.com/super/privacy

Q. I have a problem with X Offer or Y Offer Advertiser. What do I do?
A. Turbine provides no direct support for issues with our offer providers. If you have an issue with something related to the offer system please direct your inquiries to the Offer Vendor.

Q. Who is the Offer Vendor?
A. Our first partner in this program is SuperRewards. Their support information may be found at http://www.srpoints.com/help

Q. I have more questions. Who do I talk to?
A. The detailed service FAQ for the offer wall is in our public KB at http://na6.salesforce.com/_ui/selfservice/pkb/PublicKnowledgeSolution/d?orgId=00D8000000

One of your options is to use Salesforce Content, which is a very usable content & collaboration piece from salesforce.com. It's fully wired in to the rest of the force.com platform and CRM apps suite too, so if you're looking to build out more of your company's apps in the cloud, it's worth taking a look at it. http://www.salesforce.com/crm/marketing-automation/document-content-management/

I totally disagree.. To me it seems powerful, simple, and very flexible. Japan Post, Starbucks, Dell, all customers... Non-profits get 10 licenses and over 4,000 nonprofits use it. http://www.salesforce.com/foundation/ Worth a look at least.

A couple of months ago, salesforce released that their userbase was still 50% IE6:

http://blogs.salesforce.com/user_experience/2008/06/salesforce-and.html

Disclaimer: I work as a software engineer at Salesforce.com.

Depending on your needs and budget, Force.com might be a viable option. It's all proprietary, but they do provide enterprise-class service level agreements and have delivered enterprise-grade levels of uptime to companies big and small ( http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/status/ ). Its Apex programming language is Java-like ( http://www.salesforce.com/platform/application-development/apex-programming-language/ ), and it's possible to write arbitrary user interfaces on it using its Java server faces extending VisualForce page layout markup language ( http://www.salesforce.com/platform/application-development/visualforce/ ).

Salesforce ensures via its processes throughout the company that no one except for you and anyone who you explicitly temporarily authorize, such as a support person in a service call, will see your data.

As new releases are created, Salesforce ensures that the APIs for previous versions do not regress, meaning that if you build an API integration on the latest version of the API and continue to use it as more Salesforce.com versions get released, your integration will work indefinitely until you decide to use the latest version of the API, and Salesforce.com hasn't dropped support for any of its obsolete API versions in years.

Depending on what you want to do with the platform, it's possible to sell your software to customers on the AppExchange. Customers, including those who already use Salesforce.com and those who do not, can install your AppExchange package and be up and running quickly. Customers who do not use Salesforce.com can use it via a platform license that you can sell directly to your customers, thus relegating Salesforce.com to be the underlying platform and giving you more complete control over your interactions with your customers. This is platform as a service (PaaS). I know, I know.. Buzzwords ;-)

Relevant URLs:
Force.com: http://www.force.com/
Salesforce.com's cloud status: http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/status/
Apex programming language: http://www.salesforce.com/platform/application-development/apex-programming-language/
VisualForce: http://www.salesforce.com/platform/application-development/visualforce/
AppExchange: http://www.salesforce.com/platform/appexchange/
API and integrations: http://www.salesforce.com/platform/integration/

Hopefully, this helps. Please don't mod me as troll ;-). I'm trying to be helpful and informative to the original poster.

Disclaimer: I work as a software engineer at Salesforce.com.

Depending on your needs and budget, Force.com might be a viable option. It's all proprietary, but they do provide enterprise-class service level agreements and have delivered enterprise-grade levels of uptime to companies big and small ( http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/status/ ). Its Apex programming language is Java-like ( http://www.salesforce.com/platform/application-development/apex-programming-language/ ), and it's possible to write arbitrary user interfaces on it using its Java server faces extending VisualForce page layout markup language ( http://www.salesforce.com/platform/application-development/visualforce/ ).

Salesforce ensures via its processes throughout the company that no one except for you and anyone who you explicitly temporarily authorize, such as a support person in a service call, will see your data.

As new releases are created, Salesforce ensures that the APIs for previous versions do not regress, meaning that if you build an API integration on the latest version of the API and continue to use it as more Salesforce.com versions get released, your integration will work indefinitely until you decide to use the latest version of the API, and Salesforce.com hasn't dropped support for any of its obsolete API versions in years.

Depending on what you want to do with the platform, it's possible to sell your software to customers on the AppExchange. Customers, including those who already use Salesforce.com and those who do not, can install your AppExchange package and be up and running quickly. Customers who do not use Salesforce.com can use it via a platform license that you can sell directly to your customers, thus relegating Salesforce.com to be the underlying platform and giving you more complete control over your interactions with your customers. This is platform as a service (PaaS). I know, I know.. Buzzwords ;-)

Relevant URLs:
Force.com: http://www.force.com/
Salesforce.com's cloud status: http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/status/
Apex programming language: http://www.salesforce.com/platform/application-development/apex-programming-language/
VisualForce: http://www.salesforce.com/platform/application-development/visualforce/
AppExchange: http://www.salesforce.com/platform/appexchange/
API and integrations: http://www.salesforce.com/platform/integration/

Hopefully, this helps. Please don't mod me as troll ;-). I'm trying to be helpful and informative to the original poster.

Disclaimer: I work as a software engineer at Salesforce.com.

Depending on your needs and budget, Force.com might be a viable option. It's all proprietary, but they do provide enterprise-class service level agreements and have delivered enterprise-grade levels of uptime to companies big and small ( http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/status/ ). Its Apex programming language is Java-like ( http://www.salesforce.com/platform/application-development/apex-programming-language/ ), and it's possible to write arbitrary user interfaces on it using its Java server faces extending VisualForce page layout markup language ( http://www.salesforce.com/platform/application-development/visualforce/ ).

Salesforce ensures via its processes throughout the company that no one except for you and anyone who you explicitly temporarily authorize, such as a support person in a service call, will see your data.

As new releases are created, Salesforce ensures that the APIs for previous versions do not regress, meaning that if you build an API integration on the latest version of the API and continue to use it as more Salesforce.com versions get released, your integration will work indefinitely until you decide to use the latest version of the API, and Salesforce.com hasn't dropped support for any of its obsolete API versions in years.

Depending on what you want to do with the platform, it's possible to sell your software to customers on the AppExchange. Customers, including those who already use Salesforce.com and those who do not, can install your AppExchange package and be up and running quickly. Customers who do not use Salesforce.com can use it via a platform license that you can sell directly to your customers, thus relegating Salesforce.com to be the underlying platform and giving you more complete control over your interactions with your customers. This is platform as a service (PaaS). I know, I know.. Buzzwords ;-)

Relevant URLs:
Force.com: http://www.force.com/
Salesforce.com's cloud status: http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/status/
Apex programming language: http://www.salesforce.com/platform/application-development/apex-programming-language/
VisualForce: http://www.salesforce.com/platform/application-development/visualforce/
AppExchange: http://www.salesforce.com/platform/appexchange/
API and integrations: http://www.salesforce.com/platform/integration/

Hopefully, this helps. Please don't mod me as troll ;-). I'm trying to be helpful and informative to the original poster.

Disclaimer: I work as a software engineer at Salesforce.com.

Depending on your needs and budget, Force.com might be a viable option. It's all proprietary, but they do provide enterprise-class service level agreements and have delivered enterprise-grade levels of uptime to companies big and small ( http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/status/ ). Its Apex programming language is Java-like ( http://www.salesforce.com/platform/application-development/apex-programming-language/ ), and it's possible to write arbitrary user interfaces on it using its Java server faces extending VisualForce page layout markup language ( http://www.salesforce.com/platform/application-development/visualforce/ ).

Salesforce ensures via its processes throughout the company that no one except for you and anyone who you explicitly temporarily authorize, such as a support person in a service call, will see your data.

As new releases are created, Salesforce ensures that the APIs for previous versions do not regress, meaning that if you build an API integration on the latest version of the API and continue to use it as more Salesforce.com versions get released, your integration will work indefinitely until you decide to use the latest version of the API, and Salesforce.com hasn't dropped support for any of its obsolete API versions in years.

Depending on what you want to do with the platform, it's possible to sell your software to customers on the AppExchange. Customers, including those who already use Salesforce.com and those who do not, can install your AppExchange package and be up and running quickly. Customers who do not use Salesforce.com can use it via a platform license that you can sell directly to your customers, thus relegating Salesforce.com to be the underlying platform and giving you more complete control over your interactions with your customers. This is platform as a service (PaaS). I know, I know.. Buzzwords ;-)

Relevant URLs:
Force.com: http://www.force.com/
Salesforce.com's cloud status: http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/status/
Apex programming language: http://www.salesforce.com/platform/application-development/apex-programming-language/
VisualForce: http://www.salesforce.com/platform/application-development/visualforce/
AppExchange: http://www.salesforce.com/platform/appexchange/
API and integrations: http://www.salesforce.com/platform/integration/

Hopefully, this helps. Please don't mod me as troll ;-). I'm trying to be helpful and informative to the original poster.

Disclaimer: I work as a software engineer at Salesforce.com.

Depending on your needs and budget, Force.com might be a viable option. It's all proprietary, but they do provide enterprise-class service level agreements and have delivered enterprise-grade levels of uptime to companies big and small ( http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/status/ ). Its Apex programming language is Java-like ( http://www.salesforce.com/platform/application-development/apex-programming-language/ ), and it's possible to write arbitrary user interfaces on it using its Java server faces extending VisualForce page layout markup language ( http://www.salesforce.com/platform/application-development/visualforce/ ).

Salesforce ensures via its processes throughout the company that no one except for you and anyone who you explicitly temporarily authorize, such as a support person in a service call, will see your data.

As new releases are created, Salesforce ensures that the APIs for previous versions do not regress, meaning that if you build an API integration on the latest version of the API and continue to use it as more Salesforce.com versions get released, your integration will work indefinitely until you decide to use the latest version of the API, and Salesforce.com hasn't dropped support for any of its obsolete API versions in years.

Depending on what you want to do with the platform, it's possible to sell your software to customers on the AppExchange. Customers, including those who already use Salesforce.com and those who do not, can install your AppExchange package and be up and running quickly. Customers who do not use Salesforce.com can use it via a platform license that you can sell directly to your customers, thus relegating Salesforce.com to be the underlying platform and giving you more complete control over your interactions with your customers. This is platform as a service (PaaS). I know, I know.. Buzzwords ;-)

Relevant URLs:
Force.com: http://www.force.com/
Salesforce.com's cloud status: http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/status/
Apex programming language: http://www.salesforce.com/platform/application-development/apex-programming-language/
VisualForce: http://www.salesforce.com/platform/application-development/visualforce/
AppExchange: http://www.salesforce.com/platform/appexchange/
API and integrations: http://www.salesforce.com/platform/integration/

Hopefully, this helps. Please don't mod me as troll ;-). I'm trying to be helpful and informative to the original poster.

Disclaimer: I work as a software engineer at Salesforce.com.

Depending on your needs and budget, Force.com might be a viable option. It's all proprietary, but they do provide enterprise-class service level agreements and have delivered enterprise-grade levels of uptime to companies big and small ( http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/status/ ). Its Apex programming language is Java-like ( http://www.salesforce.com/platform/application-development/apex-programming-language/ ), and it's possible to write arbitrary user interfaces on it using its Java server faces extending VisualForce page layout markup language ( http://www.salesforce.com/platform/application-development/visualforce/ ).

Salesforce ensures via its processes throughout the company that no one except for you and anyone who you explicitly temporarily authorize, such as a support person in a service call, will see your data.

As new releases are created, Salesforce ensures that the APIs for previous versions do not regress, meaning that if you build an API integration on the latest version of the API and continue to use it as more Salesforce.com versions get released, your integration will work indefinitely until you decide to use the latest version of the API, and Salesforce.com hasn't dropped support for any of its obsolete API versions in years.

Depending on what you want to do with the platform, it's possible to sell your software to customers on the AppExchange. Customers, including those who already use Salesforce.com and those who do not, can install your AppExchange package and be up and running quickly. Customers who do not use Salesforce.com can use it via a platform license that you can sell directly to your customers, thus relegating Salesforce.com to be the underlying platform and giving you more complete control over your interactions with your customers. This is platform as a service (PaaS). I know, I know.. Buzzwords ;-)

Relevant URLs:
Force.com: http://www.force.com/
Salesforce.com's cloud status: http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/status/
Apex programming language: http://www.salesforce.com/platform/application-development/apex-programming-language/
VisualForce: http://www.salesforce.com/platform/application-development/visualforce/
AppExchange: http://www.salesforce.com/platform/appexchange/
API and integrations: http://www.salesforce.com/platform/integration/

Hopefully, this helps. Please don't mod me as troll ;-). I'm trying to be helpful and informative to the original poster.

Disclaimer: I work as a software engineer at Salesforce.com.

Depending on your needs and budget, Force.com might be a viable option. It's all proprietary, but they do provide enterprise-class service level agreements and have delivered enterprise-grade levels of uptime to companies big and small ( http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/status/ ). Its Apex programming language is Java-like ( http://www.salesforce.com/platform/application-development/apex-programming-language/ ), and it's possible to write arbitrary user interfaces on it using its Java server faces extending VisualForce page layout markup language ( http://www.salesforce.com/platform/application-development/visualforce/ ).

Salesforce ensures via its processes throughout the company that no one except for you and anyone who you explicitly temporarily authorize, such as a support person in a service call, will see your data.

As new releases are created, Salesforce ensures that the APIs for previous versions do not regress, meaning that if you build an API integration on the latest version of the API and continue to use it as more Salesforce.com versions get released, your integration will work indefinitely until you decide to use the latest version of the API, and Salesforce.com hasn't dropped support for any of its obsolete API versions in years.

Depending on what you want to do with the platform, it's possible to sell your software to customers on the AppExchange. Customers, including those who already use Salesforce.com and those who do not, can install your AppExchange package and be up and running quickly. Customers who do not use Salesforce.com can use it via a platform license that you can sell directly to your customers, thus relegating Salesforce.com to be the underlying platform and giving you more complete control over your interactions with your customers. This is platform as a service (PaaS). I know, I know.. Buzzwords ;-)

Relevant URLs:
Force.com: http://www.force.com/
Salesforce.com's cloud status: http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/status/
Apex programming language: http://www.salesforce.com/platform/application-development/apex-programming-language/
VisualForce: http://www.salesforce.com/platform/application-development/visualforce/
AppExchange: http://www.salesforce.com/platform/appexchange/
API and integrations: http://www.salesforce.com/platform/integration/

Hopefully, this helps. Please don't mod me as troll ;-). I'm trying to be helpful and informative to the original poster.

Disclaimer: I work as a software engineer at Salesforce.com.

Depending on your needs and budget, Force.com might be a viable option. It's all proprietary, but they do provide enterprise-class service level agreements and have delivered enterprise-grade levels of uptime to companies big and small ( http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/status/ ). Its Apex programming language is Java-like ( http://www.salesforce.com/platform/application-development/apex-programming-language/ ), and it's possible to write arbitrary user interfaces on it using its Java server faces extending VisualForce page layout markup language ( http://www.salesforce.com/platform/application-development/visualforce/ ).

Salesforce ensures via its processes throughout the company that no one except for you and anyone who you explicitly temporarily authorize, such as a support person in a service call, will see your data.

As new releases are created, Salesforce ensures that the APIs for previous versions do not regress, meaning that if you build an API integration on the latest version of the API and continue to use it as more Salesforce.com versions get released, your integration will work indefinitely until you decide to use the latest version of the API, and Salesforce.com hasn't dropped support for any of its obsolete API versions in years.

Depending on what you want to do with the platform, it's possible to sell your software to customers on the AppExchange. Customers, including those who already use Salesforce.com and those who do not, can install your AppExchange package and be up and running quickly. Customers who do not use Salesforce.com can use it via a platform license that you can sell directly to your customers, thus relegating Salesforce.com to be the underlying platform and giving you more complete control over your interactions with your customers. This is platform as a service (PaaS). I know, I know.. Buzzwords ;-)

Relevant URLs:
Force.com: http://www.force.com/
Salesforce.com's cloud status: http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/status/
Apex programming language: http://www.salesforce.com/platform/application-development/apex-programming-language/
VisualForce: http://www.salesforce.com/platform/application-development/visualforce/
AppExchange: http://www.salesforce.com/platform/appexchange/
API and integrations: http://www.salesforce.com/platform/integration/

Hopefully, this helps. Please don't mod me as troll ;-). I'm trying to be helpful and informative to the original poster.

Software as a Service does offer a great way to bring your product to market. Check out http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/. If you write it on their platform it is free to post. There is a charge if you mash something up.

• No more buying, installing, and managing your own software
• No more buying, installing, and managing your own hardware
• No more dedicated IT headcount
• No more owning and managing of your own data centers
• No more long rollout cycles
• Because everything is web-based, people can connect from anywhere in the world
• Etc.

• http://www.traverseit.com/
• http://www.salesforce.com/
• http://www.netsuite.com/
• http://www.37signals.com/

#!/your/path/to/perl -w
use strict;
use warnings;

Well, it seems like a lot of people would happily run financials via the web ... our company is moving to that from installed Windows apps, and it wasn't my doing, it was our CFO.

I seem to remember a few years back being told by a Siebel sales guy that hosted software for sales CRM wasn't going to fly either, but I bought it anyway :-)

Business / Microsoft

Spot the dinosaur
Mar 30th 2006 | REDMOND
From The Economist print edition

Microsoft’s core business is under threat from online software

IMAGE

RECENT advertisements for Microsoft show office workers as dinosaurs, stuck in a bygone era. Aptly, it is an accusation that some are now making about the software company itself.

Microsoft earns more than half its $40 billion or so of annual revenue—and the vast majority of its profits—on just two products: the Windows operating-system and Office, a collection of personal-computer (PC) applications including word-processing and spreadsheet programs. Both, however, are coming under threat from new technologies.

The pressure Microsoft is facing in its core businesses is similar to one confronted by IBM—another firm that was once synonymous with computing. At the beginning of the 1990s IBM had to face up to the shift from a computing world dominated by mainframes to one dotted by personal computers. In this new world hardware became a low-margin commodity and Microsoft’s operating system took the privileged position. Today, Microsoft still dominates the PC market. But like IBM before it, today’s giant knows that its position is under threat.

The threat to Microsoft comes from online applications, which are changing how people use computers. Rather than relying on an operating system and its associated application software—bought in a box from Microsoft, and then loaded onto a PC—computer users are increasingly able to call up the software they need over the internet. Just as Amazon, Google, eBay and other firms provide services via the web, software companies are now selling software as a subscription service that can be accessed via a web-browser. Salesforce.com, the best known example of this trend, offers salesforce management tools; other firms offer accounting and other back-office functions; there are even web-based word-processors and spreadsheets. This lowers the economic and technical barriers to entry for firms wanting to compete with Microsoft, as well as diluting the advantages the firm gets from controlling how the computer works.

These huge shifts in computing take a very long time, because there is so much inertia in the marketplace—the idea of online applications has taken years to get even this far. Microsoft is still in a position that most firms would kill for. Its two main products—Windows and Office—remain fabulously profitable quasi-monopolies. Even if online applications and open-source software make rapid progress, Microsoft would retain a powerful and profitable position for some time.

For all that, however, online applications clearly threaten the way Microsoft makes its money. Its licensing agreements are geared for a world where software is a physical product, purchased on discs, and paid for at once or in regular instalments. But its online competitors charge each user a subscription: some like Google are even supplying software as a free online service, financed by advertisements. Last month Google acquired the firm that created Writely, a popular online word-processing program that is an obvious potential competitor to Microsoft Word.

Online competitors have also mastered quick development and deployment times that Microsoft cannot match. Meanwhile open-source software—developed co-operatively and distributed free of charge—is also gaining ground. George Colony, the boss of Forrester, a technology-research firm, believes Microsoft faces the biggest challenge in the firm’s history: “Bill Gates knows how to compete with anyone who charges money for products,” he says, “but his head explodes whenever he has to go up against anyone who gives away product

Hah. When salesforce is down I reload the following pages repeatedly: http://trust.salesforce.com/, http://slashdot.org/, http://www.fark.com/, etc... Its fun to watch them keep tacking time on to their estimates as they completely fail to fix whatever it is that is preventing me from getting anything done. Of course, salesforce is fine right now, and I am still failing to get anything done... but at least it is my own fault this time.

In a pure act of corporate hubris they named it http://trust.salesforce.com/. You know know something's deeply wrong when a simple status screen is given that hard of a PR spin.

The Trust was taken over by the Goa'uld. How did you expect them act? I mean, duh. :-P

This message brought to you by Salesforce.com This article reads like a press release from Salesforce.com, the biggest player in the "software as a service" marketspace. I tried Salesforce when I started my VoIP business; if they're the market leader, this industry is too immature to be taken seriously.

First off, it isn't cheap--Salesforce.com is $65 per month, per seat and it has to be paid 3 months in advance. This makes it quite a bit more expensive for small businesses than say Goldmine or ACT. Secondly, the reliability was horrible. CRM is the lifeblood of any organization. *Any* downtime results in all of your customer facing people (sales team, customer support staff, billing, etc) basically sitting around on their hands. Sales leads were lost and customers were pissed off. The worst part about it is that we couldn't do anything about it. I couldn't reboot a server, rebuild table indexes, sacrifice an intern... nothing. I wasn't told what the problem was when the system came back up, nor was I even notified *when* they came back online. And I wasn't given an apology or a service credit.

After several very public blackeyes Salesforce finally released a systems status page. In a pure act of corporate hubris they named it http://trust.salesforce.com/. You know know something's deeply wrong when a simple status screen is given that hard of a PR spin. Sorry, but they already blew my trust. I don't care what BusinessWeek says, I wholeheartly recommend that an organization keep their key systems in-house!

Why would anyone PAY for something they can't have? And what happens to those Word docs when your subscription runs out?

The same thing that happens when thousands of businesses stop paying their subscriptions to salesforce.com or netledger.com. Totally web-based apps, with critical business data living behind the firewall at the service provider, is scarecely a new thing, and continues to ramp up - especially for mid-sized companies. It's a risk, but only to the extent that you don't have a provision for obtaining your data in some form before pulling the plug. No one who cares about their business would use MS's toys or Google's without a graceful way out.

There was a time when contact management (or, in a more sophisticated form, CRM - customer relationship management) was a desktop app like Act or similar products. Enter SalesForce.com. You could say the same thing about what used to be the province of QuickBooks Pro, or lighter-weight implementations of accounting apps like Solomon or Great Plains, and look instead at NetLedger.com. These are complete migrations from desktop business apps to subscription-based web apps. Likewise with newer versions of tax prep software, etc. This is not new.

That being said, I don't want to have to be internet-connected in order to work on a word processor document.

Throwing out the whole PC seems a bit excessive.

The article describes the irrational disposal of perfectly sound hardware, only the software had become compromised - it's more than "a bit excessive" it's irresponsible and very bad for the environment.

Further, it suggests that the guy who runs this "internet company" doesn't have a clue about computers, so I won't be trusting his company with my business, or my credit card details, any time soon.

The company were obviously going for free publicity by bragging about this behaviour, but they've only managed to do a Gerald Ratner.

Have you considered something like SalesForce.com

Try using salesforce.com, a web-based ASP of CRM software, costs about $60 per user/mo though but they host and operate the software and data for you, so you can access it from any browser wherever you are!