Salesforce.com will announce next week at its inaugural Dreamforce user and developer conference in San Francisco new versions of its namesake hosted CRM application service and sforce hosted application server.
The company will also announce a partnership with Research in Motion Ltd. to allow Salesforce.com customers to access their hosted applications via RIMs BlackBerry wireless devices.
Salesforce.com will announce the Winter 04 release of its namesake service with new features for dashboards that integrate corporate metrics with key business performance indicators; workflow automation to support the creation of business rules and triggers; support for sending alerts of new business events; and contract management improvements that support the creating and tracking of customer contracts.
Other new features include improved customization capabilities and integration with desktop applications—thanks to new controls and a Web services API in sforce 2.0, Salesforce.coms hosted application server and development environment—and support for 11 languages and currencies.
Sforce 2.0 supports custom object definition for customization and new controls for extending user interfaces to specific requirements. Another new feature is a SOAP and WSDL-based API that makes a companys data and business process model available to popular development environments like BEA WebLogic, Borland Jbuilder X and Microsoft Visual Studio.Net.
Sforce 2.0 also includes a new Object Query Language to query objects through the API via an SQL-like syntax and workflow controls for triggering business rules and automating business processes.
Sforce 2.0 is included as part of Salesforce.com Winter 04. Salesforce.coms 8,000-plus customers will be upgraded to the new services automatically.