Thoughts on Dreamforce 2009

As my fourth year at Dreamforce wraps up, I continue to be overwhelmed by the strength of the cloud computing movement. This conference, once a meeting ground for like-minded anti-software junkies and Salesforce.com admins, has become the confluence of energy and change in the application technology space. Every keynote,  presentation, luncheon and networking event was overflowing with people anxious to see the bleeding edge of this already leading edge technology.

We were thankful to present our GreatVines customer ranking and segmentation engine, just one component of our Direct-to-Consumer marketing module, to a few hundred interested partners and fellow developers. Our submission in the Force.com 40 Innovation Showcase this year garnered a runner-up placement and a short 7 minute demo slot.  Here are other memorable items from the conference:

• Salesforce Chatter – a bold new concept in which the best of Facebook and Twitter, from the consumer web, are brought into the Enterprise software world. Imagine knowing as much about your data and your team, as you do all your friends on Facebook! I think it is brilliant of Salesforce to so quickly identify this massive user experience trend and incorporate it into their core platform.
• The Salesforce Report Wizard will change with Spring 2010 to become a single-step left-panel interface, which previews with live data! This will greatly enhance the reporting capabilities on the core platform and allow our customers to adapt to report training and modification much faster.
• Salesforce Content is now free! This is great news for the entire Salesforce and Force.com community, including our 3-tier and wholesale customers. Contact us to find out more about how you can begin leveraging this amazing capability right away.
• Congratulations to Jason Ouellette who won the Developer Hero award. Jason is a friend of GreatVines and Rogue IT who recently published the definitive book on Force.com development.

We expected an announcement on new Portal User pricing, which is part of our wine club module (login, logout, update contact information, review orders) but will now wait until after their Fiscal 2010 closes in January.

Stay tuned to this website for the latest updates on Force.com, GreatVines, and how this technology can be best adapted to the Wine and Spirits industry. Please subscribe to our updates at the top of the page if you would like email notifications of new content.