Who Is More Excited About Upcoming Winter'11 Releases, Salesforce.com Users or Microsoft Users?

Jeffrey Schwartz (Redmond Channel Partner, Editor-at-Large Redmond Magazine) wrote a recent article for Redmond Channel Partner Online, titled Dynamics CRM Facelift Brings Confidence to the Channel. I read the article, hoping to get some insight about the upcoming "Salesforce.com Challenger", but I think I'd be discouraged if I were a Microsoft partner. The whole article seemed to be an endorsement for Salesforce.com.

Here were some of my favorite quotes:

""I just went on a call for CRM and the VP of sales just keeps pushing Salesforce, Salesforce, Salesforce and he'll find a flaw in anything else no matter what you implement," says Jeffrey Goldstein, managing director of New York-based Queue Associates Inc., a Gold Certified Partner.

Forrester Research Inc. analyst William Band says while Microsoft Dynamics CRM has gained appeal, outpacing Salesforce.com could be a high bar to clear.

"In order for Microsoft [Dynamics] CRM to become a billion-dollar business, the market has to grow more or somebody else has to lose a lot of market share," Band says. "I don't know that there's that much space in the marketplace for Microsoft CRM to get that big. I don't know where another billion would come from."

A further source of frustration for Goldstein is the $49 per month price tag for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, which he says is far less expensive than Salesforce.com, yet customers aren't swayed by that. Price and feature comparisons are not the issue, Goldstein says. "The problem we run into is so many VPs of sales and ex-sales people just have a history with Salesforce. They just ask for it by name and they just refuse to use anything else," he says.

So what's in this upcoming release for Microsoft CRM 2011?  According to the article, here are the key features:

"Outlook Integration: Users can manage their CRM interactions from within Outlook. CRM data can be treated like any other Outlook data.

Ribbon: The Office Ribbon added to the new Outlook also will be added to the new Dynamics CRM client.

Role-Tailored Design: Users access relevant forms based on their role in the organization and are restricted from accessing data they're unauthorized to view.

Inline Data Visualizations: Users can create charts, drill down into them and share them.

Real-Time Dashboards: Customers can provide real-time dashboards to assess business performance.

Solutions Management: Developers and IT managers can package up all customizations and install them into the system and they can stay protected from others inadvertently overwriting them.

Field-Level Security and Record-Level Auditing: Important to any organization where privacy and/or compliance are required."

This isn't exactly material that will steel market share from Salesforce.com.  These features have been standard with Salesforce.com for more than 5+ years.  By comparisson, in it's upcoming Winter'11 release, Salesforce.com is deploying:

Chatter: Probably the most talked about Salesforce.com feature in the past few months, Chatter asks the question, "What are you working on?" It brings social media into the CRM tool, giving Salesforce.com a Twitter or Facebook like facelift. It seems to be making a real difference in user adoption among the companies that are deploying it in production.

Outlook 2010 Integration: This release will have a number of key (and much needed) improvements related to Outlook 2010 integration, including: email added indicators, improved Outlook administrator settings, increasing # of characters supported in the Subject field, 64-bit OS Support, simpler synch features and scheduled sync functionality.

Reports, Dashboard Improvements: Salesforce already has very powerful reporting and analytic features built in. In the Winter'11 release, there are a number of improvements targeted toward this Salesforce.com feature: drag & drop report columns, drag & drop dashboard features, improved report sorting functions, ability to run Dashboard reports as "current user", ability to change the running user in real-time, improved chatter integration, and more.

Improved Search functions: ability to search Content (document libraries), improvements to the advanced search features.

Improvements to the Change Sets deployment features

Improvements to Sites (web site hosting inside Salesforce.com), including support for 30x redirection

These are just a few of the features that Salesforce.com is rolling out at the request of Salesforce.com Customers (via their IdeaExchange forums). On top of all this, we're going to see some nice new functionality related to VMforce, Chatter, calender scheduling, consoles, and more.

Salesforce.com weighs in with a heavier price tag, but it remains easier to implement, easier to customize, and contains more functionality "out of the box" than it's Redmond competitor.  Salesforce.com remains my preferred CRM in the competitive marketplace.

Salesforce CRM Talent in High Demand

The unemployment scenario may be grim, but Salesforce.com CRM Talent is in high demand. 

Erik Palumbo is a corporate recruiter at ModelMetrics, Inc.  They're looking for a Salesforce.com Technical Architect, and finding it to be a real challenge. He has posted to multiple LinkedIn user groups, tapped his traditional network for talent acquisition, and says he's finding "little interest".

I wouldn't categorize it as "little interest", but rather "supply and demand". Salesforce.com is hot right now.  Admins, Developers, Technical Architects, Contractors, and Consultants are in short supply. David Taber commented similarly in his recent CIO article, "The CRM Talent Shortage: Here, Now".

I have also heard this repeated in the local Salesforce.com User Group meetings I facilitate and other CloudForce user conferences I attend.  At Comcast, I've been helping our HR department find additional Salesforce.com talent, and it's been challenging for us, too.  The number of personal calls and emails I've received from recruiters is up sharply in the past two months, averaging 3-5 per week.  It's really surprising!

I gave Erik many of the same recommendations I gave my corporate HR department:

1.) For LinkedIn job postings, I recommend the Salesforce.com Professional LinkedIn Network.  It is one of the oldest LinkedIn Groups, and is managed by Salesforce.com employees (Jeanine Thorpe, Erica Kuhl, Tom Wong, and Jamie Grenney).  It's the forum were Salesforce.com posts their own job opportunities, as well.

2.) The Salesforce Community discussion boards have a Job Board for Admins and Job Board for Developers.  You may find a pool of candidates there, who don't frequent or participate in LinkedIn groups.

3.) On one of Erik's job descriptions, I read that he didn't want to be contacted by 3rd party / recruiters. In Erik's case, that makes sense: he IS the corporate recruiter for his company.  For most other companies, I would encourage they use recruiters.  Don't be fooled by this crazy job market.  Even though unemployment is high, skilled Salesforce.com CRM talent is in great demand.  You may need to work harder at luring those candidates toward your company.  A technical recruiter may be your best bet for filling an internal Salesforce.com Ninja position quickly: you need a hunter to help you find the right talent.

4.) Consider spending your budget dollars to TRAIN the right candidate, rather than RECRUIT the right candidate.  Don't wait for Salesforce.com talent to fall from the Clouds!  You may find it easier to find someone that has some of your core requirements, and put them through a rigorous Salesforce.com Boot Camp program.  Find a talented business analyst / java developer / project manager, and introduce them to Salesforce.com.  Put that firehose right down their throat and have them drink deep.  For the near term, this may be the best chance for getting your internal Salesforce.com job postings filled quickly.

A final note to employers who already have Salesforce.com talent: hold on to them.  I don't see this CRM talent shortage ending soon.

Good luck!

Salesforce Blogs, Books, Ideas, Videos and Developer Goodies

Blogs

After writing my The Most Influential Salesforce.com Tech Bloggers article, I’ve received links to some other great-looking Salesforce.com Blogs.  Check 'em out:

• Arkus Blog, authored by @JustEdelstein
• TECH GERM, authored by @abhinavguptas
• Adventures in the Cloud, authored by @amber9904
• Just Your Average Salesforce Admin, authored by @mattybme
• Technology Share, authored by @aslambari

You can follow these five bloggers, and all the other SFDC Tech Bloggers on Twitter with one click. Click the “Follow this list” button here.

Books

Jeff Douglas and Wes Nolte have teamed up to write "The Salesforce Handbook: A Newcomer’s Guide to Building Applications on Salesforce.com and the Force.com Platform".  They published a teaser excerpt on their blog: The Salesforce Handbook.  The book is not due out until October (plenty of time to get your signed copy at Dreamforce 2010!). Visit their blog to join the email subscription list.

Salesforce IdeaExchange: Ideas I Liked / Promoted

Allow Single Test Method Execution from an Apex Class (120): Give Developers / QA Testers the ability to select the specific test methods that should be tested in an Apex test class. Handy for when you are trying to debug a single method! Vote it up here.

Cool Videos

I really liked this Flash App Demo  by James Ward.  The demo shows the power of the new Flash Builder tool, and integrating it with Salesforce.com.  In the demo, James shows an app that allows him to take a picture of a person, associate it with a contact record in Salesforce, which then automatically uploads that picture into a custom image field on the Salesforce contact object.  Very cool, check it out at the The Salesforce Channel.


Developer Stuff

In the Salesforce blogosphere, there is lots of interesting stuff happening on the developer front.

Managed Package Woes:  Abhinav Gupta of Tech Germ describes a common problem that developers first encounter when migrating their Force.com web-service apps from a developer org to a managed package.  During this migration, and external Java, Flex, PHP or .NET client code that made web-service calls to the Salesforce WSDL Web Services break, because the custom sObjects and fields get unique prefixes during the packaging.  He presents two solutions, read more ...

Java Namespace Exception Errors: Abhinav follows that great article with a 2nd one, describing the cause, effect and solution for when Java namespace exception errors are thrown, when using WSC and Apache Axis WSDL2 Java together in a JVM or project.  To avoid this problem, Abhina suggests compiling the WSDLs using WSC.  Read more ...

Force.com Explorer (Beta): Salesforce Developers and Admins have a new tool for their arsenal: Force.com Explorer (Beta).  This is an AIR app, built with Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com, which allows you to “browse your database schema, custom objects, and fields, and build test SOSL queries. It can also generate a simple schema report.”  Read more at Developer Force.

VisualForce Pages that Talk to You? Aslam Bari thought of a great new trick: enable your VisualForce Pages to Speak!  He found two useful web service / plugins on the net: jTalk is a an API that converts text to speech on the fly, and DewPlayer is flash MP3 player. Combined, you can integrate these into your VisualForce pages and convert output data to speech. Read more at Technology Share. One of the barriers for new developers posting apps to the AppExchange has been the cost of getting those applications reviewed and approved by Salesforce.com. That barrier has become less impacting, with lower security review fees. Read more at Developer Force.

Posting AppExchange Apps Just Got Cheaper: One of the barriers for new developers posting apps to the AppExchange has been the cost of getting those applications reviewed and approved by Salesforce.com. That barrier has become less impacting with lower security review fees. Read more at Developer Force.

Marc ... is that you?

I used to have a little counter on the side of my blog, which tracked the number of unique vistors on my site.  I'm sure you've seen these gadgets before -- almost every newbie website designer puts them on their first website, and every professional web developer cringes at the sight of them.

I replaced the visitor counter with a widget from Clustr Maps (I suspect this gadget makes professional web developers cringe, too). Clustr Maps gives both a visitor counter, and it also tags the location of visitors on a world map..  Every now and then I'll go take a peek at the world map, looking for answers: who are you? Where do you come from? What brought you here?  Most importantly, how can I help?

Tonight, I discovered a new red blip in Hawaii.  Hey, that's where Marc Benioff lives!

Several years ago, after my first Dreamforce event, I sent a personal note to the Salesforce.com CEO.  I told him that I was blown away, that Dreamforce had changed my whole aura. Within an hour, Marc replied simply, "Mahalo."  It's Hawaiin, I had to look it up.

I wasn't exagerating in that note.  Dreamforce had changed something inside me.  When I returned home, I started doing more volunteer and local community service work.  I started approaching problems with a very different mindset.  I started sharing more.  I started blogging.  My career path changed.  Everything changed.

Dreamforce is now 4 months away.  If you are a Salesforce.com Administrator or Developer, Dreamforce is the most valuable event you can attend.  There is so much energy, learning opportunities, and networking opportunities at this annual conference.  It gets bigger, better and more festive each year.  Friendships that you make at Dreamforce will last long afterwards, and you will be able to tap them all year long.  I was "between jobs", and missed last year's Dreamforce event ... I can't wait to go back this year!

Will you be there?  Let's connect!

Register here: http://www.dreamforce.com/.  Register today!

The Most Influential Salesforce.com Tech Bloggers

"If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants." -Isaac Newton


Updated:  I found an error in my earlier posting: the value of the Alexa ranking was reversed. I mistakenly thought that a high Alexa ranking was favored over a lower ranking.  I corrected the ordering based on the Alexa scores (sorry, Mike - now I'll have to buy YOU a beer at Dreamforce!). 

Mark Fidelman (EVP Sales @ MindTouch) recently wrote an article for the Cloud Ave blog titled, "The Most Influential Technical Communication Bloggers".  I recognized a few names, added several to my Google Reader feed, but most were unfamiliar to me.  Blogs are a primary information source for me, and I read a lot of them each week.  When I first started working with Salesforce, I grew up on a steady diet of Gokubi.com, CRM FYI, X2 On-Demand, and Perspectives on Salesforce.  These were the giants on whose shoulders I stood.

I compiled a list of Salesforce.com Bloggers, and then because I was curious, ranked them in a similar manner as Fidelman's Most Influential Blogger article: a weighted formula across a range of metrics, including Alexa, Klout Influence, Google Page Rank, Technocrati Authority, and Twitter Followers.  I also added a 6th category: # Blog Posts YTD.  Each category was given an equal weight, scaled on a rank of 1-10. With 6 categories, a blog could have a ranking between 6-60 – the most influential bloggers scoring at the top side of that range.

I started with a simple Google search on “Salesforce Blogs”, recording the URL for each. I arbitrarily stopped after the first six pages returned by the search engine. If the authors of various blogs included links to other Salesforce blogs (and many did), I added those to my research list, as well. In the end, I found 47 different Salesforce.com blogs. To be included in the ranking, a blogger needed to focus their posts on Salesforce.com, with at least 6 Salesforce-related blogs posted YTD.


For blogs that were co-authored, I used the Twitter account associated with the “Retweet” button on that blog. For instance, the Cloud Blog is co-authored by various Salesforce.com executives: Marc Benioff, Parker Harris, Peter Coffee, John Taschek, and Steve Gilmor. The “retweet” button on this blog uses the Twitter alias @salesforce, so that is what I used to evaluate the Klout influence and Twitter following of that blog.

Top 10 Most Influential Salesforce.com Tech Bloggers
Here are the Top 10 Most Influential Salesforce.com Bloggers (NOTE: There were ties for 4th, 9th and 10th place):

 
Here is the detail break-out for all of the blogs that made the ranking qualifications:
 

Rank	Author	# Posts YTD	Alexa	Google Page Rank	Technocrati Authority	Klout Score	Twitter Followers
1	Jon Mountjoy, Quinton Wall, Reid Carlberg, Umit Yalcinalp, Dana Le	177	200,867	5	126	25	1436
2	Marc Benioff, Parker Harris, Peter Coffee, John Taschek, Steve Gilmor	45	312	0	0	49	9025
3	Steve Anderson	16	1,527,075	6	1	25	474
4	Jeff Douglas	69	650,409	4	0	19	417
4	Appirio Tech Blog	16	304,254	5	0	10	1181
5	Scott Hemmeter	6	1,275,872	6	1	25	1436
6	Jeff Grosse	11	2,962,398	4	0	28	1532
7	JP Seabury	6	2,918,131	3	1	18	1066
8	MK Partners	97	1,020,411	3	1	10	169
9	David Schach	7	8,045,399	4	0	43	934
9	Jason Venable	27	2,213,081	3	0	19	167
10	Mike Gerholdt	18	27,426,342	3	0	22	627
10	Alessandro	19	2,978,238	3	0	13	202
11	Mike Leach	23	4,393,577	0	0	14	585
11	Jared Miller	10	0	2	0	7	251
12	Wes Nolte	12	408,999	0	0	8	211
13	Mark Christie	31	911,745	2	0	0	34
14	Joel Dietz	16	12,357,441	0	0	15	142
15	John Rotenstein	10	3,855,810	6	0	0	45
16	ForceTree	10	2,059,232	2	0	0	0
17	ForceDotCom	12	10,359,827	2	0	0	0
18	Sid	6	9,440,652	0	0	0	0

Honorable Mentions
There were 30 other blogs, but many were filtered from the rankings process due to the infrequency of their posts (the arbitrary cut-off was 6 posts YTD, averaging 1 per month). Of these blogs, Honorable Mentions go to:

Michael Smith, Simon Fell, Liz Kao, Jesse Lorenz, John Coppedge, Alex Sutherland, Joe Ferraro, Michael Smith, Dave Manelski, Interactive Ties, Shamrock CRM, and Sam Arjmandi.

If I missed your blog (or a Salesforce-related blog that you read regularly), please let me know!