This week Giles and I attended the 8th annual Dreamforce conference in San Franscisco. It’s not often that you go to a conference hosted by a company and find yourself surrounded by 30,000 believers who all love the product. This week has demonstrated what change really is and how it should be delivered.

Over the past few days Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce.com, announced a series of offerings that changes Salesforce.com from being a CRM solution to being the leader in Cloud Platform Solutions.

In the coming months the following solutions will be available:

• Database.com
• Siteforce
• Appforce
• VMforce
• ISVforce

The focus of these solutions is to breakdown the barriers by removing complexity and deliver functionality in the cloud that can be used by all. To further facilitate this Salesforce have announced they are acquiring Heroku.

Marc also announced that Chatter, the collaboration tool from Salesforce, will be made available free. Collaboration is the new buzz word but this is the first time the word has been used correctly. Chatter provides a simple solution to the issue of information overload that we all suffer.

This tool is a game changer in all organisations because it reduces “noise” within organisations by :-

• delivering the information you want/need to know about so you are always on top of that deal / customer issue,
• allowing teams to collaborate in real time on any item in Salesforce such as projects or opportunities,
• allowing the users to easily setup groups which can be used to drive projects / sales teams / opportunities,
• delivering into your feed, the dashboard to allow you to focus on what matters in your role / company,
• being easy to use.

The best example of how Chatter is a game changer is the Chatter app that was released by Salesforce for Dreamforce, which saw over 17,000 attendees utilising the app. This gave us the chance to collaborate and meet fellow attendees, setup user groups, set agendas months before the conference officially kicked off. When I arrived at the Moscone Centre on Monday I felt like I already knew half of the people there because we had all collaborated in the Dreamforce Chatter app. More importantly, I’m connected with fellow attendees from across the globe and not just from my region developing one large community.

The Dreamforce app will now live beyond the conference and is now a true collaboration community allowing the “chatterees” to continue to utilse the app to seek solutions for problems, retain the groups we formed in the lead up to Dreamforce and grow other groups, ultimately help each other.

The most important takeaway I have from Dreamforce is, Salesforce.com is a game changer and is the leader in delivering solutions in the Cloud.

Please contact us for more information on the new platform initiatives or Chatter, and how you can transform your business by adopting Chatter.

Scheduled Data Export is a rarely talked about feature that may make you a data savior one day.

Data Export lets you prepare a copy of all your Salesforce data. You can generate backup files manually once every six days or schedule them to generate automatically at weekly or monthly intervals. When an export is ready for download you will receive an email containing a link that allows you to download the file(s).

Below are the directions to schedule a backup.

1) Click Setup | Data Management | Data Export and Export Now or Schedule Export. The Export Now option prepares your files for export immediately. This option is only available if a week has passed since your last export. The Schedule Export option allows you to schedule the export process for weekly or monthly intervals.

2) Select the desired encoding for your export file.

3) Select Include attachments… if you want your export data to include attachments.

4) Select Replace carriage returns with spaces if you want your export files to have spaces instead of carriage returns or line breaks. This may be useful if you plan to use your export files for importing or other integrations.

5) If you are scheduling your export, select the frequency, start and end dates, and time of day for your scheduled export.

6) Select the types of data to include in your export. If desired, you can include all data in your export file. We recommend that you include all data if you are not familiar with the terminology used for some of the types of data.

I’ve personally seen this feature save many companies time, money and embarrassment, so setup this free feature today.