So Dan Galorath has noticed Force.com and started to quantify the savings he believes users can achieve with it.  It looks like Marc Benioff sent the results around to all of SFDC.  With good reason – Galorath estimates 30-40% lower costs when compared to Java.

Very cool.  And consistent with my experience. 

In an explanatory article, How Galorath Quantified the Salesforce.com Platform, there are a couple of interesting nuggets hidden all the way at the bottom:

"For applications that are consistent with the built in capabilities of the SalesForce.com Platform, there appears to be about an 80% reduction in the actual development effort. Because of the ability to create with point-and-click operations to support prototyping, the requirements and design effort is reduced with estimates ranging from 10% to 25%."

You read that right: 80% reduction in development effort.  Wow.

And, since I’m a nitpicker, I’m going to pick on one thing.  Galorath writes:

"APEX does not provide UI services or support external web service calls, the primary focus is to provide data oriented transactional services – more like Stored Procedures in Oracle or SQL Server."

The web services call issue is just incorrect.  APEX absolutely supports those.  And the UI services section — I think this is splitting hairs.  APEX doesn’t, but Visualforce does.

Oh and since I’m really a nitpicker, it’s not "SalesForce.com" with a capital "F".  It’s lower case.  C’mon people.

Glad to see Force.com getting some good formal attention.  Now if we could just get some Z notation animators for it.

So it’s post Dreamforce 08 — awesome.  Love DF, love getting home from DF. 

On the flight, I noticed something interesting: if you cruise into Eclipse, the plugins directory, where you have the Force.com IDE, you’ll see a "com.salesforce.ide.documentation.[a bunch of numbers]".  If you look in there, you’ll see a directory called "platform_labs", and if you look in there you’ll see a fair amount of info re: Force.com Sites.

All of which was released on 10/27/2008, several days before THE BIG ANNOUNCEMENT.

Note to self: look for hidden goodies in the next release of the IDE.

I was fortunate to present a couple of our Flex and AIR based solutions at Dreamforce with Dave Carroll (Salesforce.com Evangelist) and James Ward (RIA Cowboy and Flex Evangelist) while at Dreamforce.   The feedback from the audience was great and it is exciting to share the message of Flex and AIR with more developers to help these technologies grow and flourish.

After the session James mentioned that you can actually embed Flex inside of a PDF.  When I first heard that it took me a second to wrap my mind around it.  Although you can do a lot with a PDF if you have the Adobe server stack, my image of a PDF is just a nicely formatted read-only document.  But the more I discussed the idea with James, the more intrigued I was.

This idea could really open up some new design and deployment patterns that may not have been possible before this.  You can now do things such as deploy an interactive chart or dashboard within a PDF that can pull updated data from the server when it is opened.  I’m curious to see what our internal teams will come up with as they start to experiment with this technology.

You can learn more here by checking out Jame’s blog entry.

We just closed down our booths at Dreamforce and are all heading back to our respective cities.  Based on credible sources Dreamforce attendance was just a few people shy of the expected 10,000.  That is a very interesting number considering some of the economic news as of late and companies that have travel bans, spending freezes, etc…  This really speaks to the power of SaaS (software-as-a-service) and PaaS (platform-as-a-service) and the value companies see in the cloud even in tough economic times.

This Dreamforce was very different than in years past for more reasons than just the growth in attendance.  The entire first day’s keynote was purely around the platform and force.com enhancements.  Depending on what tracks you attended you almost wouldn’t remember that salesforce.com has a CRM product.  With the advances in APEX, Visualforce and now Sites they have put together a very viable platform that can be used in a wide variety of situations.

We have received a lot of great feedback for our new products that we unveiled at Dreamforce, or shortly before so.  Everyone loves the idea of Search2GO (demo) and searching for data within salesforce.com from their iPhone for any edition of salesforce.com (other than Group edition).  It was exciting to talk to someone from Japan by our mobile booth who is a big fan of Expense2GO and has been using it since it launched with the AppStore back in July.  It really proves the international support of the iPhone and force.com when you see users from all over the world storing data in their local language and currency.

We were fortunate to have early access to force.com Sites as well as the Amazon toolkits and the timing worked out perfectly as we could use them as the foundation for our new Lasso2GO product suite.  We are very impressed with what you can do by leveraging best-of-breed services from force.com and Amazon Web Services  to build cloud platforms that were not possible before these platforms existed.  It was exciting to see Charlie Bell (VP of Infrastructure for Amazon.com) on stage with Marc Benioff and Adam Gross and have them showing off our upcoming CardLasso application.  I’m looking forward to applying this same technology stack to our customer base as we help them build new applications we haven’t even imagined.
 

Pretty psyched about the new developer account limits: 2 full licenses, 3 platform, 5 partner, 10 customer.  Now that’s what I call a dev account.

Oh and yeah there’s sites in there too.

I’ll probably sign up for a second one today just so I have a spare.

While I’m thinking about it: I’ve heard a few people had some challenges with the Webassessor tool during their cert.  How long will it be before that tool is replaced by one built with native functionality? I’m guessing I won’t have to ask this question twice.

I’m at Dreamforce in the keynote. And the focus is all about the cloud computing convergence.

Everyone is excited about the new force.com Sites product. With Sites you can now use the power of Visualforce to create a public facing website. The Site is dynamic and content is delivered directly from custom objects. You can also use Ideas on your public site just like Starbucks using css and Visualforce.

Check out our new product built entirely on Sites and also Amazon WS at http://www.lasso2go.com.

Well, if you did, you definitely weren’t hanging out with me. Certification exam done (and passed — hooray), many people said hello to and one very late dinner at a very nice restaurant complete (thank you, Informatica geniuses). 

You’d think with all that I’d be asleep. You’d be wrong.  I’m up polishing some slides and I’m going to try to get a quick workout in before the 7:15a meeting.

Today: Keynote (should be awesome), Oh!Zone Customer Hero Theater (should also be awesome) and I’m pretty sure I’ll be at the booth at some point. 

Cheers!

CHICAGO and SAN FRANCISCO – Today at Dreamforce 2008, salesforce.com’s annual user and developer conference, Model Metrics revealed a revolutionary cloud-computing application called CardLasso. CardLasso, part of the Lasso2GO application suite that utilizes services from salesforce.com’s new Force.com Sites capability and Amazon Web Services, enables users to capture business card information using a mobile device camera and automates the transcription of contact data, which is automatically presented for download to the user from www.lasso2go.com.

<Link to full press release>

CHICAGO and SAN FRANCISCO – November 3rd, 2008 – Today at Dreamforce 2008, salesforce.com’s annual user and developer conference, salesforce.com partners Model Metrics and Enrollment Rx announced a new relationship that will change the way educational institutions manage the student enrollment process.

<Link to full press release>

Just pulled into SFO.  The Nikko, actually.  I have a tiny room but boy is it quiet.  Love it!

Why?  It gives me space to get my thoughts together.  The next three days are going to be long ones — but they also promise to be very interesting. 

I’m kicking off with a cert exam, then heading to the global gala, dinner tonight at 9p.  Breakfast tomorrow at 7a, the keynote which should be super cool (looking forward to the new video — last years rocked), I present in the Oh!Zone at 12:30p and then to the booth for the rest of the day.

I think.

On top of this I have a list of about 100 people I want to "run into".

And one of my fellow bloggers is now telling me I’m late to meet him and another out front.

Awesome.  I’ll sleep on Wednesday.

PS Party at Foley’s on Tuesday?  Oh yes: party at Foley’s.  You’re invited.