But wait, there's more!

There's a lot more in Salesforce than the pieces that replace Contact (Accounts, Contacts & Opportunities). I haven't learned how to use all of the features yet and I'm not even sure I know what all the features are yet!

This morning there was an article in the San Jose Mercury News about IM (Instant Messaging) coming into the enterprise. They featured a lot of information on Microsoft's Sharepoint which will include IM in their next version. Salesforce already has that. They call it "Chatter" and it was released this Spring. I saw a demo of it at Dreamforce, Salesforce's annual users' conference. Besides being able to "chat" with people, as with all IM programs, in Salesforce's Chatter, you can chat with objects. So, for example, you could mark an Opportunity to let you know any time someone updates it.

I'm eager to learn more about Chatter and see how it can help us here at Pivot. As we move more of what we do in Dexter into Salesforce, I see even more opportunity for Chatter to be a very useful tool.

Another new feature released this Spring is "Answers". I've just started looking into this but it looks like a way to post questions to a community, then as people answer the questions and answers are kept on the web. I'm thinking this may be a good alternative to those emails the salespeople often send out asking, "Does anyone know where I can find....?" I think being able to keep all those questions and answers, and search in them, will be very useful. I could see the designers, and others, building up an excellent knowledge base with "Answers", too.

There's a Quotes module, too, that I plan to check out. Also a Self Service Portal that I believe we can use both for our customers to be able to see and submit certain information and for our vendors. There's a big module called Content for uploading and sharing files which will be very useful for marketing but also potentially for sharing files among ourselves, perhaps creating a vendor library online. There's an object called Cases which looks like it might be something we could use for our service and warranty work. And who knows what else there is in this cloud?!

I'll be reading, watching videos and learning about more of Salesforce's features as time goes on, and I'll be encouraging you to, too. In June I'm scheduled to attend a 4-day certification training on Salesforce and I'm hoping I'll come back for that bursting with new ideas and things to try.