Salesforce Rolls Out a Facebook for Businesses – COPYCAT

Will it WORK ? in the past APLINK has worked for mammoth companies typical of that which SALESFORCE really targets and from this experience i would forsee that these companies would now have new job roles avaialble for “Chatterboxes” to keep Chatter ALIVE. facebook’s survival & growth is based on largely passionate chatting people. In commerical ebvironments these Chatterboxes will need to be PAID. – on a final thought – is SALESFORCE now copying not leading ?

Today Salesforce.com has announced the private beta for Chatter, which will be rolling out to 100 companies now before officially launching later this year. I had a chance to talk to Salesforce.com and get a demonstration of how Chatter works. For businesses looking for a collaboration solution, this could be a big winner.

Built on the Existing Force.com Infrastructure

What makes Chatter such an interesting concept is that for Salesforce.com customers, it builds into the existing platform. So for businesses that use the SalesCloud or ServiceCloud applications, this fits right into that solution seamlessly.For small businesses — and for larger or more spread out operations, too — having your collaboration tools integrated into your CRM system makes a ton of sense.

Works Like Facebook, Built for Business…

read more via MASHABLE Salesforce Rolls Out a Facebook for Businesses.

Salesforce unveils Twitter CRM software – Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal:

Salesforce.com quick to monetize twitter – before even twitter does !

Salesforce Inc. on Monday said it will offer a customer-relationship management application for the popular micro-blogging service, Twitter.

The new application aimed at helping companies find and assist their customers who are going to Twitter community to solve product problems rather than call customer service.

Comcast Corp. and Dell Inc. have already signed up for the Twitter to Service Cloud, San Mateo-based Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) said.

The software lets customer-service agents search for tweets on their products and companies, look through a database for answers and keep track of the “conversation level” on a certain topic or product. It will cost $995 a month for five agents and five business partners, and support for 250 customers.

via Salesforce unveils Twitter CRM software – Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal:.

Reliability of Gmail & Cloud Computing – itsReal

Earlier this week I was held ransom by Gmail ! I, like so many other SMB’s have put my trust in Gmail over other email packages like Outlook, but for several hours I could not access Gmail & today I am experiencing issues with Gmail – why do I suggest ransom, well it is a word that suggests being held back against one’s will, in this case my will to do my work.

But what position do you have when Google offers Gmail for Free ? How are other service offerings from the likes of Salesforce.com with CRM – addressing this outage issue ?

This timely report from The Wall Street Journal might help… and then again maybe it won’t – either paid of unpaid an outage of service is to be expected and accepted ?

Gmail glitch shows pitfalls of online software

By Ben Worthen and Jessica E. Vascellaro, The Wall Street Journal Thursday 26 February 2009

Latest outage wiped out email service for two and half hours.

When Google Inc.’s online-email service shut off for over two hours earlier this week, it brought to light concerns about whether businesses can safely rely on software that their employees access over the Internet.

Online software services like Google’s Gmail — which run on vast computer farms managed by companies like Google and Salesforce.com Inc., rather than businesses installing and operating the software themselves — are a bright spot for the technology sector: Sales grew 27% in 2008 to $6.4 billion, according to research company Gartner. Such services are also often cheaper to operate and easier to get started on, making them attractive options during a recession.

Google’s Gmail is one of the most widely-used pieces of online software. Most users are familiar with the free version. Google also sells a suite of online-software services, including an advanced version of Gmail, to companies for $50 a year per user account.

But companies are finding that going online to do business-computing tasks via services like Google’s or similar ones offered by Amazon.com Inc. and Salesforce.com, among others, comes with a risk: When something goes wrong, customers must sit idly while waiting for someone else to fix the problem.

“Any time there is a failure it creates concern,” said John Dohm, vice president of information technology at True Religion Apparel Inc.

In early February, the online warehouse-management system that True Religion uses was unavailable for two hours, making it impossible for the Vernon, Calif., company to fill orders.”There was nothing I could do about it,” said Mr. Dohm.

The latest Gmail outage, which wiped out the service for two and a half hours beginning at 4:30 a.m. EST Monday morning, was caused by some new software having the unexpected side effect of triggering a bug in the Gmail code, which caused a data center to become overloaded when users were directed to it, said Dave Girouard, president of Google’s enterprise division, in an interview Wednesday.

The company said it affected a …

Read more here: http://www.totaltele.com/view.aspx?ID=443603&Page=2

ZOHO – should salesforce.com be concerned – itsReal

I just signed up recently for the free CRM – hmmm

If you’ve heard of Zoho, you probably think of Zoho Office, its suite of Web-based productivity software (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation). But Zoho Office is primarily as a marketing exercise. Zoho’s real business is in offering a series of Web-based enterprise apps that it started introducing last September—CRM, Project Management, Web conferencing, an online database. And today it is adding Zoho People in beta.

Zoho People is a Web-based enterprise app for managing human resources—recruiting, org charts, HR forms, an employee self-service portal. Here are some screenshots and an online demo.

Zoho People is targeted at small businesses with 50 or more employees—companies that cannot afford PeopleSoft, but cannot manage their business on Excel spreadsheets anymore. More directly, Zoho is going after WorkDay (started by PeopleSoft founder Dave Duffield), Salesforce.com, and smaller online HR apps such as Vemo’s. To get businesses to try it, the software will be free for the beta period. The pricing is yet to be determined, but will probably be in the range of $50/month for HR administrators and $4/month for other employees. It will also be available as part of Zoho’s suite of enterprise apps under blended pricing. Maybe Salesforce should just buy Zoho. Oh yeah, it already tried that.

Read more at Techcrunch