Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Pattern Finder: Dreamforce Announcements: Visualforce and Salesforce Content

Guy Creese on a subtle Salesforce strategic shift 

Salesforce also announced Salesforce Content, a new service derived from their Koral acquisition. It's basically in-context content management: rather than storing marketing and sales documents in other repositories (e.g., SharePoint or Documentum) companies can store them in Salesforce. When a company generates a sales proposal to a prospect, they can store it with their Salesforce record. However, it's not just an attachment capability. Users can vote on content (giving a thumbs up to a good datasheet and a thumbs down to a bad datasheet), subscribe to alterations in content (notify me when the pricelist changes), and see which is most popular based on downloads.

This is an interesting alternative to horizontal collaboration and content solutions such as SharePoint 2007. Rather than getting into an IT-centric platform debate, business units will buy Salesforce Content to solve a specific problem they have (the sales reps can't find the relevant documents easily). This is a camel-getting-its-nose-in-the-tent move by Salesforce.com.

Pattern Finder: Dreamforce Announcements: Visualforce and Salesforce Content

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