More news from Salesforce.com Spring ‘07: AppSpace

Next up during the keynote is/was George Hu, Chief Marketing Officer, talking about the Spring ‘07 release. This is the 22nd release – perpetual beta indeed. Lots of customer participation too – everything from the logo to features in the new release – much of which is surfaced in IdeaExchange. Though I haven’t heard “web 2.0″ uttered yet, it feels like these guys are embracing it.

George gave a little demonstration – some features that jumped out:

• popup reminders (apparently customers want these!)
• Ajax (?) rollovers with additional information.
• Enhanced search (it’s what most folk do when they log in) – lots of sexy on-page Ajax refresh when sorting/finding data.
• Embedded mashups
• Locked records for approval workflows with audit trails etc. They can even approve via email etc. Which means Salesforce accepts inbound emails – lot more email-based services coming in the future because of this.
• Time-based workflows – for example “7 days before opportunity close data create a task to send an email and create an approval escalation”

There are undoubtedly lots more – but this keynote doesn’t seem to be focussing on any hardcore developer details. Indeed, they speak about S-Controls and the like as if they’re all very new and that the audience won’t know much about them. I presume they’re right…

George then announced something new – AppSpace (with all their fonts and typesetting it’s hard to know how to write these names in plain text). It all happened rather quickly – but if I understand it right it’s essentially myspace for the enterprise. Customer portals on steroids. So you will be able to create your own “space” for your customers – customized, branded customer portals – that leverage the full Salesforce.com platform.

Aside: So what is this? An focused enterprise mashup tool? That’s how I see it. This is interesting, and potentially disruptive too. We recently had the IBM’s of the world coming out with their products in this space. Salesforce.com is here too now – all hosted, all on-demand. I look forward to hearing more details about this – Google is coming up empty right now ;-)

A nice little phrase George used: “written with clicks, not code”

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