Salesforce.com launches Spring 04

As regular as the four seasons, Saleforce.com unveiled its Spring 04 CRM application last week.

The Winter 04 edition saw the introduction of a customizable Sforce development platform using open APIs as integration hooks into other enterprise applications. The Spring 04 release extends those capabilities with Sforce 3.0 to include Web services APIs, support for IBM WebSphere and Lotus Notes, and a toolset to work with Microsoft .Net, among other applications.

The feature that appeared to attract the most attention from customers attending the launch party was the new customizable tabs, which allow users to create a business process or custom application. A custom object can have its own database tables and page layout and can be related to other data in other applications.

“We created a user tab to track how many times our customers log in to our site,” said Ron Hess, CRM manager at Neoforma, an SCM (supply-chain management) solution provider for the health care industry that uses Salesforce.com’s service. Hess said the custom tab helps his support people track who is logging in, when, and how much time they spend at the site.

Another added feature in the Spring 04 release is Salesforce.com Studio, which provides the ability to create custom tabs and new applications, according to Pat Sueltz, president of technology, marketing, and systems at Salesforce.com.

Three new standard tabs were also added: a product tab for managing product catalogs; a contract tab for contract tracking and management of renewals and approvals; and a solutions tab, a best-practices knowledge base for customer support.

“What’s important about what Salesforce.com is doing is that they are making CRM strategic. Features like customizable tabs give a company a competitive edge in their market right off the shelf,” said Josh Greenbaum, principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting.