Salesforce.com shows off upcoming CRM upgrade

Salesforce.com. is focusing on integration with the Summer ’05 edition of its online customer relationship management (CRM) product, it said Tuesday.

The release, due online in June, includes Sforce 6.0, an upgrade to the Salesforce.com integration offering. Part of Sforce 6.0 is a new Sforce Partner Portal toolkit that will let users create dedicated Web sites for partners. Salesforce.com unveiled and demonstrated several of the new features at a San Francisco event that it dubbed “Integrationforce Day.”

Another part of the new edition is Multiforce, which will allow users to either customize or build multiple applications running on top of shared services. Applications built on the platform can share a single data repository and use the same security features and user interface. Multiforce was announced last month and shown Tuesday for the first time.

Multiforce is built atop Sforce using Salesforce.com’s Customforce customization toolset. It is designed to let customers and third-party developers expand on Salesforce.com’s service, so the service can go beyond CRM to provide other hosted services such as event planning or recruiting support.

“We’re building a platform,” Salesforce.com Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff said in a presentation at the event. He taunted traditional software vendors Oracle, Microsoft, Siebel Systems and SAP for running years behind in offering a CRM product that can be easily integrated with a user’s other enterprise applications.

In addition to the Partner Portal toolkit, Sforce 6.0 includes a new Data Loader to let customers upload large chunks of data to Salesforce.com’s systems and a new Self Service API (application programming interface). The API lets customers include the features of Salesforce.com’s self service Web site in other sites and applications, Salesforce.com said.

Another new feature is single sign-on, which gives customers the option of linking their enterprise user directory to Salesforce.com. This would mean a user signed on to Windows won’t need to log on separately to Salesforce.com. Directories supported include Microsoft’s Active Directory and other LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) directory services.

The single sign-on and the partner portal features jumped out at Christopher Pokrana, responsible for relationship management applications at United Way of America, a charitable organization that hopes to start a Salesforce.com pilot with 300 users in June. “Single sign-on is something I have been asking for,” Pokrana said.

The same features will be investigated by Analog Devices, which uses Salesforce.com for field sales purposes, said IT manager Rich Feist. The semiconductor company also would like to talk more with Salesforce.com about deeper integration between its applications and the Salesforce.com product, which is used by about 800 people, Feist said.

Missing from Salesforce.com’s new release is an improved Salesforce.com test environment, which Pokrana and Feist as well as other users attending the event on Tuesday would like. Today it is not possible to build custom features in a Salesforce.com test environment and then migrate it to a production environment, these users said.

“One of the biggest issues I have with our developers is a testing environment,” Pokrana said.

Salesforce.com is working on improving the testing possibilities, users said. “They listen to their customers,” said Feist.

As of January 31, Salesforce.com had about 13,700 customers and about 227,000 paying subscribers, the company said.