Salesforce Content Demo

Salesforce.com recently added some more information about the new Salesforce Content product coming out soon (late Q4?). You can check it out at Salesforce.com/content or view the demo here. This product was developed after Salesforce acquired the 9 person, San Mateo based Koral.com

The features look really nice – making it much easier to organize, find, track, and use documents but once again I’m left feeling that this should be an included upgrade to the sub-par document system we currently have rather than paying an additional fee for an add on service. I would hope that at some point this is rolled into the service levels much like Google Adwords product was but I’m guessing that will depend on how high the demand for the product will be.

This is definitely something we would use and would make our work more efficient (the product really does look good), but as a small business owner the price we pay for Salesforce is already a significant part of our overhead and this could increase it by an additional 30% – 50% if the buzz I heard about pricing is true. I understand that they would need to limit bandwidth but perhaps this is a product that could be based on usage or total storage rather than the standard per user / per month pricing we’re used to.

Digging Out From Winter 07′ Release

It’s been a couple of days since our account was upgraded to winter 07′ and we’ve only touched a fraction of the upgrades. The feature that jumps out immediately is the related list hovers, making it much easier to navigate to the information you need on your account and contact tabs. The upgraded calendar view is very nice, and also comes with hover pop-ups to make viewing much quicker and clearer. The task pop-ups are great – I only wish there was an easy way to go back and “enable” all of the previous tasks created in our organization. I started playing around with the console, but so far I’m not seeing how this feature will benefit our company. I’m sure this is great for call centers and other high volume applications, but for now I’ll move it towards the bottom of the list of upgrades. The validation rules should be extremely helpful, I’m wishing we had these when we implemented our custom fields but we’ll gradually go back and put them in where most needed.

There are tons of new features, all of which can be found here: http://blogs.salesforce.com/features/winter_07_release.html. I highly recommend downloading the full 215 page user manual.

It’s been rather quiet on the blog front, myself included. I’m hoping all these great new features sparks some new discussions and creative implementations.