Tour de... eBay Developers Conference!
by Adam Gross on May 13, 2008 at 02:43 PM
We have always been big fans of eBay, and especially the work they have been doing with their platform - so we were delighted to be invited to keynote and present at the eBay Developers Conference June 16-18th in Chicago. There has been a lot of great work between our communities already, including Infopia's e-commerce app and the Skype mashup - but when you add in the new integration features of Apex and Visualforce, along with a host of APIs from Skype, Paypal and other eBay services you can quickly imagine some pretty interesting new apps. Join us there to learn the technical details of how to bring Force.com and eBay together (and show us what you've built since our Chicago Tour de Force last month!)
In India, with Force(.com) !
by Anshu Sharma on May 13, 2008 at 01:33 AM
The Tour de Force events across the globe continue to draw great attendance and interest from developers looking to build new SaaS applications. The event is yet to make its way to India but I have been traveling across India (Pune & Bangalore) meeting with partners, educating them about Force.com and Platform as a Service generally – and the response has been tremendously positive. At one of our partners in Pune, I delivered an hour long session on PaaS and Force.com – and the result was a lot of very interesting questions and interest in this paradigm shift. A similar event in Bangalore with over 100 attendees drew a similar response.
India is Ready
There was genuine appreciation about how difficult and wasteful it is to currently build, deploy and manage software applications. This is especially true for IT outsourcing firms that month after month see ISVs and IT departments of large enterprise burn time and money on infrastructure and platform, delaying and risking delivering business value to the end users.
India is a country of young people – over 50% of
More
interestingly, the senior executives and technology gurus – some that
wrote compilers in 1980s by hand – were even more excited about this
shift. The questions and discussions revolved around how to navigate
this shift and understanding the new evolving SaaS ecosystems and not
whether the shift is underway.
Here is a sampling of questions:
Is There a Whitepaper on SaaS?
Yes,
we do have whitepapers on SaaS and PaaS. However, whitepapers are so
90s – I encouraged our audience to learn through building and
engagement with the community – blogs, online forums, how-to wiki’s, informational videos.
What Kind of Applications Can I Build on PaaS?
Even as salesforce.com started out as a CRM company, the Force.com platform is being used by our customers and partners to build out applications that cover wide variety of solutions be it Finance and Accounting (Coda), Risk Management (Riskonnect), Life Sciences (Verticals OnDemand) and many others. Business Applications that are data and process driven is where Force.com provides the most value today
What about Security?
No
one asked this question – so I thought I will mention it. This question
that resulted from both genuine apprehensions and FUD created by
certain vendors that did not have SaaS capabilities is increasingly
becoming a non-issue. I think there are two reasons for this: First, as
customers use more and more SaaS applications their experience
invalidates the concerns. Second, initiatives such as
trust.salesforce.com that educate and inform have re-assured the
community of users, developers and investors.
Really?
Yes,
this question was asked a few times. For example, when I explained that
Force.com is multi-tenant not just for our direct customers but also
for all applications written by end users and partners – and that
everyone is on the latest version of the software. The response is:
Really?
Salesforce.com’s success
with the platform in releasing as many as 25 major releases in last 8
years – and comparing that to once in 3 to 7 years cycle for legacy
software vendors also draws a: Really?
So yes, really!
The proof is in the pudding – you are welcome to get a free developer login and build an app.
The Dev Zone Meets the Masala Zone
by Mark Trang on May 4, 2008 at 10:48 PM
After crossing the pond this past weekend, most of the Force.com team is now in London this week for the Dreamforce Europe 2008 conference. So apparently chicken tikka masala is the UK's most popular restaurant dish as opposed to my personal British pub favorite, fish and chips - as a result, our first meal in town was at Masala Zone in Convent Garden where many of us met the newest member of our team, Jon Mountjoy, former editor-in-chief of BEA's Dev2Dev online community. Unlike the rest of us Yanks, Jon lives in Edinburgh and will be able to provide better coverage for our EMEA community.
The Force.com evangelism team will be meeting with many developers at the Dreamforce event and also doing one-on-one meetings throughout the week with customers and partners in London. Drop us a line and let us know if you're in town for Dreamforce and we'd be happy to make time this week to help you build your next great app! If not, stay tuned for the latest technical announcements coming out of Dreamforce - we're excited by all the platform features that Force.com developers will soon be able to get their hands in the Spring '08 production release and upcoming Summer '08 feature preview!
Updating a Classic
by Ron Hess on April 30, 2008 at 10:17 PM
With all the excitement around Tour de Force, and the upcoming trip to London for Dreamforce Europe, I wanted make sure you didn't miss a cool update to a classic AppExchange app called PrintAnything. A while back I wrote a blog post that covered how to integrate PrintAnything with Google Docs to generate PDF output. Now, with the updated version of PrintAnything called Astitch Document Generator, you can perform this directly using the service provided by Astitch.net.
There are two things I like about this app, first off it's free and secondly it's a technically deep product, lots of customizations are possible once you learn how to utilize XSLT templates and construct the required SOQL queries. Not a task for everyone, but if XSLT is exciting or even something you would like to learn, check out this app!
The Tour de Force strikes again in Boston!
by Kavindra Patel on April 24, 2008 at 10:15 AM
We landed in Boston along with thousands of people from all around the world who had come to run the Boston Marathon. But the more than 500 Force.com customers, partners and developers who joined us at the Tour de Force event had a different goal in mind: to learn how to build apps on the Force.com platform.
Salesforce administrators and developers got really excited, not only because they were able to attend Tour de Force for free and attend sessions tailored for them, but they were able to go to the DevZone Immersion Lab, pick up the Force.com Workbook, sit at one of the Apple Macs, log into their own “free Developer Edition account” and learn about Force.com Builder, Force.com IDE, Apex Code, Visualforce and Force.com Code Share while building a simple mileage tracker app in a short time between sessions.
As I was talking to folks at the early evening reception in the DevZone, many of them were telling me they had realized the power of the Force.com platform and ideas were sparking in their minds, from building new business solutions for their company to building their own software-as-a-service businesses by developing Force.com apps to sell.
If you were not able to take advantage of the educational experience as part of the 1st leg of the Tour de Force, watch for the next set of Tour de Force events coming to a city near you.
Meanwhile, you can go to "Getting Started" on the Force.com Developer Community site.
TdF NYC: Force.com Hits the Big Apple
by PK on April 16, 2008 at 04:41 AM
Ahh, New York! As a guy who grew up in the North Jersey suburbs and lived a few years in Brooklyn, New York City feels like home to me. I rode the A train through Brooklyn from JFK, walked up Broadway to the park, had a pastrami sandwich and Dr. Brown's for dinner, and fell asleep to the noise of street construction 17 stories below on 53rd street -- it's all good!
And even better will be today's Tour de Force event. Marc Benioff is here to lead the keynote, and we're expecting well north of 600 attendees -- the DevZone is going to be as busy as Sheep Meadow on the first warm and sunny Saturday in an NYC April. We're building on the momentum and energy we generated in Atlanta and Chicago, so this promises to be the best event yet. And with a bigger set of sessions -- nine across our three tracks -- we're taking the New York community even deeper into Force.com. It's going to be a great day.
Windy City, are you ready?
by Mark Trang on April 9, 2008 at 10:02 PM
The Tour de Force team just landed in Chicago for the next stop on the Tour tomorrow, April 10th. Earlier this week on Tuesday, over 300 attendees came out to the Atlanta Tour de
Force event. Highlights included hearing the latest Force.com platform news and seeing apps that ISVs and customers like Riskonnect, CODA,
and Delta Airlines were building using platform technologies. Many
attendees also got the chance to attend breakout sessions that covered
topics like Apex and Visualforce and later roll up their sleeves to work on Force.com app building exercises in the Dev Zone. If you happen to be in the Windy City, stop by and say hello to see what we have in store for you! Marc Benioff will be keynoting and you’ll have many opportunities during the day to get technical questions answered and meet the Force.com evangelist team (see pic of Ron Hess and Dave Carroll working hard at the airport). We've been busy preparing content, code samples, labs and demos over the past months and look forward to meeting everyone in Chi-town and discovering where the best place is for deep-dish pizza!
Tour de Force Atlanta DevZone Lab is Ready for Your use
by Kavindra Patel on April 7, 2008 at 09:31 PM
Last few weeks have been really busy as our Force.com team member, Nick Tran worked on creating the Force.com lab tutorials. With the help from the Force.com R&D team and the evangelists we got them tested, just in time for us to get them printed and delivered to the Tour de Force Atlanta DevZone Lab.
Nick and I landed in Atlanta late afternoon and got to the Hyatt Regency Atlanta to setup the DevZone Lab systems so that it is ready for your use tomorrow. We are really excited about the new lab tutorials as we have tutorials for folks that have a salesforce.com admin background and would like to build an app using the Force.com AppBuilder. For those of you who are developers, you will want to take advantage of the tutorials that will teach you how to write an app using the Force.com IDE, Apex code and Visualforce. We will also have a team of Force.com experts to help you with the tutorials and get your technical questions answered.
The DevZone will be open the whole day starting at 9am. Please stop by to pick up the Force.com Workbook, get some hands-on to build your first app!
For the folks attending Tour de Force Atlanta, see you in the morning. If you are not close to Atlanta, check out the next set of Tour de Force cities.
-Nick Tran and Kavindra Patel
Anticipating Atlanta
by PK on April 4, 2008 at 06:32 PM
I got confirmation today that the official Tour de Force 18-wheeler with all our gear, signage, and extra-large supply of Force.com goodies is rolling on down the highway on its way to Atlanta for our next event on April 8… so this tour is officially on the road!
It's Friday now, but all week the entire team has been extremely busy working on session slides, some very cool demos, new lab content and of course finalizing all the details that will make this our next great event. But that’s all fully baked and in the can now, so we get a little relaxation and time to pack before heading out Monday. Which reminds me: I need to remember to bring extra batteries for the Wii controllers (yes, the Wii Golf Tournament continues as a Tour de Force DevZone tradition).
Oh, and if you should happen to see the Tour de Force semi out on the interstate on its way to Atlanta, or to Chicago, New York, or Boston after that, be a good buddy and post your pic to Flickr with the tag tdf08. I’m dying to see a shot of the truck, as well as any other Tour photos. And if Flickr glory alone isn’t enough motivation for you, I’ve got some nice developer.force.com t-shirts, jackets, and other schwag set aside to reward the best photo posts.
Hope to see you in Atlanta.
See Nick Carr, On de Tour
by Adam Gross on March 31, 2008 at 08:50 PM
I'm delighted to announce that Nick Carr will be joining us for most of the first leg of the Tour de Force (sorry Chicago!). So if you are signed up for Atlanta, New York, Boston or London, as part of the keynote you'll be able hear from Nick on the transition from software to utility computing - a theme at the center of his new book, The Big Switch.
A hundred years ago, companies stopped generating their own power with steam engines and dynamos and plugged into the newly built electric grid. The cheap power pumped out by electric utilities didn’t just change how businesses operate. It set off a chain reaction of economic and social transformations that brought the modern world into existence. Today, a similar revolution is under way. Hooked up to the Internet’s global computing grid, massive information-processing plants have begun pumping data and software code into our homes and businesses. This time, it’s computing that’s turning into a utility.
Admission to Nick's keynote, and the rest of Tour de Force, is free in U.S. (and included in Dreamforce admission for London), but space is limited to be sure to sign up today to secure your seat.
