Dreamforce 2008 Report
Big Announcements
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Salesforce continues to grow and invest in their service offering. At Dreamforce, they announced a number of new capabilities that would be rolled into the donation license program for nonprofits in 2009:
1) Salesforce Sites: a new capability of Force.com (the Salesforce development platform) that will allow customers to build and run public-facing websites in salesforce.com's cloud. Sites was certainly THE big deal for me at Dreamforce 2008, and I think it could be a huge tool for NPower moving forward. While I am somewhat skeptical about our customers running their entire websites on Sites, it will enable us to create several “killer apps” that integrate with Salesforce data and appear on public-facing websites. You build Sites pages using Visualforce, which is a markup language a lot like the Zope Page Templates we use in Plone (except it connects directly to your database).
Here are a few applications that we need desperately and will be a good fit for Sites:
· Online event listing and RSVP – Invite people to your events by email, they click on a link to a Sites page and tell you how many people are coming and so forth, workflow sends them reminders – Steve Andersen and I made big progress on this one during the “Monday Night Hack-a-thon”
· Newsletter subscription management
· “Update your own profile” pages
· Customer survey pages (without using a third-party vendor such as click tools)
· Class attendance management
· Payment processing – I believe we could use Sites and Apex to deliver a killer online donation service
· Online Grant Applications!!!
The pricing includes Sites in the nonprofit donation, so as soon as this is generally available (Spring? Summer?) I plan to be ready to offer all these tools to our customers. As you know, we’ve spent a lot of time and effort to create web integrations like this; now we can leverage tools we already know to provide access to the core database. These tools will be very easy to create and customize, not to mention SELL on the appexchange. Can you tell I am excited?
2) Amazon & Force.com: By using Amazon Web Services (AWS), enterprises, ISVs and developers can build applications and run them entirely in the cloud, this technology leverages both the database, logic and user interface features of Force.com and the storage and compute capabilities of Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 services. I looked at the sample code for Amazon S3 integration today. It is great – we will have no trouble creating pages that push large files into cheap S3 storage – and since nonprofits have found that Salesforce document storage is too expensive, this may be something we want to offer.
3) Salesforce.com and Facebook Integration: Facebook the world's largest online social community has introduced a new suite of tools to marry next-generation business productivity applications to the interpersonal power of social networks. I love the idea of getting into this – but it sounds hard!
4) Without giving away too many details, I did a bit of quiet publicity for our upcoming easy-to-install template (aka “the DOT”). I learned that One/NW will most likely do a DOT like ours, too.
5) I pitched our new Brown Paper Tickets integration, available on the Salesforce AppExchange at http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/detail_overview.jsp?id=a0330000005m9VjAAI. I expect we will get a few early adopters out of it, and when we do, I hope to circle back to Brown Paper Tickets and see about that long-awaited “Sponsorship.”
6) Our NPower NY pals were delighted to discover that the Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO) a New York based Human Services organization and an NPower customer won the 2008 Nonprofit Salesforce Appy Award for excellence and innovative use of technology to deliver its mission. It is a big honor.
Our Friends
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We encouraged our customers to attend Dreamforce, and several of them did! We were excited to see folks from Unitus, Social Venture Partners, Multifaith Works, and Provail. I expect their reviews of the conference will be greatly mixed, but I hope they all found some value in the presentations.
Vinod from Unitus was a speaker – I had recommended him to the Salesforce team for this. Vinod spoke about their extensive use of tools on the AppExchange, including Vertical Response, ActevaRSVP, a recruiting app called JobScience, and (drum roll please) Plone. Vinod was incredibly gracious: he raved about the Unitus site and the work we did to integrate Salesforce data on the site.
One of the best things about Dreamforce for me is sharing with other developers and consultants. I was able to connect with many other nonprofit-focused humans, including Steve Andersen, Joey Gray, and Dave Manelski from One/NW, Judi Sohn from Colorectal Cancer Coalition, Meghan Morrison from Swift River, Matt Kaufmann from MK Consulting, and of course Marc Baizman, Lisa Glass, and Sonny Cloward (former NPower NY).
The options for nonprofits using Salesforce continue to expand each year; at the same time, it is worth noting that the majority of nonprofits continue to be at a loss for how to get where they want to go. There is a lot of excitement about Convio’s Common Ground donation implementation, precisely because it promises to help bridge the gap for organizations that don’t have good consulting help—although at a high subscription price. I believe NPower should also move forward with plans to provide a better alternative to the “Nonprofit Edition” configuration and tools provided by the Foundation; in any case, we intend to do this for our Seattle customers.
Other Things I Saw
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A few folks on the Expo floor worth mentioning:
1) Echo Sign (www.echosign.com): Digital signatures for contracts. One/NW uses and recommends this, and I hope we are going to look into it for NPower Seattle. Nonprofit discount.
2) CRM Orbit (www.crmorbit.com): I had not met these folks; they are an implementor with resources in India, and seemed interested in cooperation w/NPower.
3) Jitterbit (www.jitterbit.com): This is server software that pumps data from one source to another. Their tools and support for Salesforce are far better than last time I looked – if you need to integrate another system with Salesforce affordably, take a look at Jitterbit. They gave me a cool rocket, too – the kids love it.
4) Vertical Response: They really are good people. Spoke with the Director of Development -- he heard all my input and promised that they are working on it.
One company conspicuously absent at DF is Democracy In Action. I heard from at least 5 people that they have tried and failed to configure the DIA integration with Salesforce. I hope they will hear from us and try to work on it in the near future, because I think DIA’s online advocacy tools are otherwise strong and a very good value.
Salesforce at NPower Seattle
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A huge highlight of the show was my private demo of Steve Andersen’s own Salesforce account for One/NW, where he has built sophisticated pipeline management, time tracking, billing, contracts, surveys, and outcomes management for their consulting business. Steve is going to share a lot of his code with me, and I expect we will see some dramatic improvements in the NPower Seattle Salesforce account in the coming year. I hope to share more about this with many of you in the coming weeks.
I must close with my election night story. The Salesforce Foundation hosted a delightful party at the top of an old hotel, with a big-screen TV near the bar. They cranked President-elect Obama’s speech for the enrapt audience, and I was caught weeping in front of my Salesforce colleagues. Afterwards, we spilled out into Union Square, which was packed with crowd of joyous revelers, and then continued to a club where we danced continuously until 2am.
If this wasn’t enough, don’t miss Patrick’s blog about Dreamforce at http://community.npowerseattle.org/patricks/uncategorized/what-i-learned-at-dreamforce-part-one/. Also, I hope some of you will pop your heads in for the first Seattle Nonprofit Salesforce User’s Group meeting, to be held at our office on Wed the 19th.