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.

Increasingly, customers prefer to receive service through the internet. According to Gartner, by 2012, 65% of all support conversations will happen over the internet. How is your company adapting?

Here at Myriad Minds, this trend has created strong demand for Salesforce Customer Portal and it’s helping our clients deliver faster, anytime service while lowering customer service costs. In fact, Gartner studies have shown the average cost of a customer interactive via phone is $7.50, while the same interaction via a self-service portal is only 50 cents. The value of customer portal is even greater now that Salesforce Content is free.

Using customer portal, your company can deliver a tailored web experience by selectively exposing internal processes to your customers. Because customer portal is built on the Force.com platform, custom portals can be rolled out in weeks, not months. A basic portal can be setup in a few days.

Some of the more common uses of customer portal include:

• Knowledge Base/Service/Cases: Provide easy self-service, 24×7
• Help & Training: Deliver rich content in an engaging experience
• Ideas: Let customers post ideas or questions, vote on the answers of their peers, and add their own comments
• Reporting: Allow customers to create reports and track their service

If you want to learn more, below is a recorded webinar that provides a comprehensive overview.