Spring Is Almost Here! Salesforce.com Talks Spring ’10
Earlier this month, Salesforce.com announced the 31st generation release that will bring new features to Sales Cloud 2, Service Cloud 2, and Force.com: Spring ’10. Salesforce offers three releases a year, but this latest one will bring an entirely new user interface. There weren’t a large number of details given outside of the press release—we’ll have to wait till Spring ‘10’s February release to see more, but there is a screenshot of what the new UI will look like (below).
For Sales Cloud 2, the new changes aim to keep sales teams efficient and generate more leads. Notably, there will be real-time quotes given—sales users will be able to generate quotes using relevant data—which is generate automatically for quoting purposes. In addition, to accommodate salespersons offering multiple quotes throughout the sales cycle, Spring ’10 has “quote sync” capabilities to sync the final quote with the opportunity in one click.
Service Cloud 2—Salesforce’s platform for merging contact center technologies with cloud computing platforms—will be endowed with Salesforce Answers, and entitlements and service contracts functionality as part of the Spring ‘10 release. Salesforce Answers will help companies leverage cloud data for customer service, and more importantly, allow users to initiate conversations through unique customer communities. The other aforementioned improvement comes in the form of call center operators having access to some of that cloud data as well—they’ll be able to track service entitlements and contracts.
And users of Force.com, Salesforce’s ever-popular development platform, will finally see Adobe Flash Builder for Force (which Salesforce announced back in October), and will also have the ability to run authenticated sites. Adobe Flash Player on Force was jointly developed, and is an integration that’ll enable building cloud-based apps that can be easily deployed to end users through the browser using Adobe Flash Player. Spring ‘10’s authenticated sites feauter will allow companies to run public and private authenticated web sites from Force.com, and customers will easily be able to add security functionalities and create web sites for myriad purporses.
Again, we’ll have to wait and see how Spring ‘10 really performs, but things sound promising thus far. Salesforce.com can hardly make an update without their competitors matching it (or trying to), so we’re excited to see what else emerges this season.
[…] and collaboration platform. But since the beginning of the New Year they’ve announced their Spring ’10 update, and more recently, the Force.com Visual Process Manager—these updates are naturally less flashy […]