Salesforce.com Turns Customization Tool Kit into New Brand

SAN FRANCISCO—Salesforce.com continued its effort to expand its product line with the introduction of Customforce.com, an on-demand tool kit that lets companies customize their CRM applications to meet specific industry business processes.

Customforce.com is a free-of-charge add-on that is designed to reduce the time it takes to customize Salesforce.coms online customer relationship management applications. Salesforce.com officials claim that application customization projects that can take weeks or months using traditional methods can be performed in minutes with the Customforce.com tool kit.

Customforce.com is part of the Winter 05 release of Salesforce.coms on-demand CRM subscription service, which also includes the Supportforce.com customer service tool that the company released in September.

The company introduced the new versions during its annual Dreamforce user conference here that was attended by an estimated 2,500 customers and users. This is about two-thirds more than attended the companys first user conference in 2003, company officials said.

Customforce.com is essentially a spinoff of the customization tool kit that Salesforce.com released in April with the Spring 04 version of its on-demand CRM applications, said company Chairman Marc Benioff.

Since then, customers have quickly picked up the tool kit to build custom fields, workflows, pages and other components into their online applications, Benioff said.

Click here to read about the advent of the customization tool kit in the Salesforce.com Spring 04 edition.

Based on customers enthusiasm for the package, "We decided that the [tool kit] should be its own product, its own technology, its own brand" that would evolve and grow with the rest of the Salesforce.com product line, he said.

Benioff said his company was encouraged to do this because "customers are really grabbing the bull by the horns. They are saying they dont want to use Microsoft Access or Filemaker to build on-demand applications. They are saying, We want to build these applications with the objects and widgets" that Salesforce.com is providing, he said.

Salesforce.com is offering the tool kit for free because it is not looking for a new incremental revenue stream, Benioff said. The company is counting on the tool kit to win new customers and to expand the use of Salesforce.com CRM within existing customer sites, he said.

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