Groundwire feels the Dreamforce
Groundwire’s Nicole Lewis with Salesforce’s always happy Chatty mascot.
A Major Nonprofit Technology Event
With a promise of being near former President Bill Clinton and getting down with Stevie Wonder while drinking from a fire hose of Salesforce.com expertise, the Groundwire database team + labs manager headed down to San Francisco last week to attend the annual Salesforce "Dreamforce" conference.
With nearly 10,000 nonprofits using Salesforce, dozens of nonprofit-themed sessions available at the conference and hundred of nonprofit representatives attending, it was a major nonprofit technology event. With so many of Groundies there we were able to spread out and try to suck up as much of this massive conference (25,000+ attendees!) as possible.
Announcements
There were more announcements than I will go into in this post, suffice to say Salesforce is releasing more and more interesting new capabilities to the platform each year. Some of the highlights are:
- Chatter Free – now everyone with Salesforce can offer people who don’t have a Salesforce account the option of joining Chatter (the instant messaging/virtual water cooler/collaboration tool from Salesforce). This makes it possible to add volunteers, all staff and even your board to Chatter. This is a big win for group collaboration.
- Siteforce – coming in Spring 2011, Siteforce is a slick new content management interface for your web pages built in Salesforce Sites.
- Ruby on Rails – with the purchase of Heroku, Salesforce is betting on major platform-as-a-service play.
- Database.com – basically if you stripped Salesforce of all the CRM and force.com capabilities you would have a powerful cloud database service. This service makes that database available to the world.
Bigger and Better
We had amazing conversations with our peers about what it takes to serve nonprofits well on Salesforce. Out of those conversations and the wealth of session content we have lots and lots of ideas for improvements to what we do. We look forward to 2011 when we’ll be making the most out of these new Salesforce capabilities as well as improving how we bring them to you.
