One of the things I’ve been thinking about more and more lately, is somehow enabling the next generation user experience for business software.
For far too long, business applications have been built for businesses, not for the people in the business…

Sales reps are notoriously touchy about their leads and who can see them. Obviously their jobs depend on others not getting their hands on them!

Even in a car dealer situation I can see problems. Just because one dealer is allowed to get leads could lead to that dealer “lending” out that lead to another sales rep “under the table”.

This service could be useful to some of their customers. Mostly franchise customers. I would guess it might have a positive impact on 5% or less of their customer base.

Let’s put it this way. If you are a sales rep, would you like it if you knew your sales manager had opened this up and your leads may get picked up by another rep! I think that says it all

My general opinion of sf.com is that they have a product that is overpriced at this point, a bit too complicated to work with for general sales reps, and the interface is old-school and not very intuitive.

They had a great marketer/pr/CEO (who came from Oracle) which was one of the finest displays of fantastic marketing abilities turning a sub-par web app into the industry leader! He is the man!

#2 – customers need to explicitly decide what they want to share, with whom and when. The opt in/opt out model forms the core of this new service, any customer can stop sharing at any time. Additionally, customers have control right to the field level on what information they want to share and can customize that by relationship, all this without any IT investment. We’ve been talking to a number of customers and prospects and I can assure you a lot of them have been looking for such a solution, especially customers who depend on their partner community (e.g resellers, distributors, suppliers, agents etc) to run their business. Think of the alternative – disparate systems, costly EDI/custom implementations that only the very big companies can afford vs. this service that takes days (not months) to get up and running, is flexible to meet the evolving nature of business relationships and is cost effective for companies of all sizes

#6 – import/export by its very nature denotes asynchronous sharing. That’s how companies share info currently – importing/exporting excel spreadsheets which we all know has resulted in no visibility and limited cross-company collaboration. This solution involves setting up a connection that defines the rules of engagement (i.e. what obj/fields to share by partner) and once a record is shared, updates flow seamlessly in a bi-directional fashion without end users needing to do anything different.

#9 – again data is only shared via explicit action by an authorized user

#10 – we have designed this service using a point and click UI design. No additional custom implementation required and we’ve gone through a number of rounds of usability with all sorts of roles to make sure the service is easy to use and flexible for different kinds of processes

Generally speaking, we’ve included additional levels of security as far as the actual data sharing is concerned, over and above what’s available with the force.com platform so that unauthorized third-party’s cannot access the shared information. Additionally since it’s built on the force.com platform it integrates seamlessly into our workflow engine therefore ensuring both data and process integrity in cross-company sharing relationships. Bottom line: companies can follow their own processes which collaborating real-time on revenue sensitive information with their business partners in a secure manner

You are almost forced to do this if you want to maintain some more involved customizations for one team separate from the other teams.

In the past, moving people from one instance to another was insanely challenging, requiring a db expert to export all the data, reupload, and relink it using the old relationships.

At first glance, it may solve this problem.

Hilary
http://modazzle...camp=SalesForce

According to this post on TechCrunch, Salesforce is announcing their Salesforce-to-Salesforce (S2S) service today. The service will allow companies using Salesforce.com to share data with one another. The cost of $100 per month will be paid by the comp…

Good luck

Parul
http://www.bhopu.com

I am assuming this is just an import/export type functionality where one instance talks to the other one to create a copy of the information.

Somewhat handy…, but realistically.., what percentage of your customers and partners are using salesforce. I also wonder if they will incorporate any “discovery mechanism”. By discovery mechanism I mean a method/process to automatically know which contacts, customers, partners, etc are on salesforce as well.

Without notification of who is using salesforce as well…, are you just required to ask everyone as part of your business process if they are part of salesforce, and then do the hookup.

I wonder how this will play with their portal offering where the main goal is paying for a solution to share data with outsiders that are not users in your system.