Thanks to Scott over at Perspectives on Salesforce for this great summary of some of the key annoucements from Dreamforce.  Stay tuned as we'll be posting more highlights and session content from the show in the coming weeks and months.

The first day at Dreamforce 2006 was amazing.  Marc's keynote had great energy and was well attended.  Marc launched Apex, our server-side programming language.  Please take a look and let us know what you think.

There will be a beta available in early 2007.  There was an incredible amount of interest to learn about Apex.

FYI for those attending Dreamforce, there is a 1-hr deep dive on Apex on Tuesday at 3:45 in the advanced developer track.  Additionally, the books that attendees received at Dreamforce have a chapter on the language that goes into quite a bit of detail.  Syntax is sure to change, but after you've read that chapter, you'll have a great idea about what is possible.

We also announced our 8.0 API today and all of the other amazing features in Winter '07.  From the launch of Sforce in 2003, we've come a long way to where we are today.  Over 40% of our traffic is web services, and most of our partners are leveraging our web services APIs for the products. 

The 8.0 brings key capabilities customers have been asking for.  I won't go into all the details in this post, but we'll be providing more information as the week goes on.  Some of the highlights:

• API Relationships.  This feature allows you to execute soql queries that bring back related data.  Some examples are bringing back a contact and its related account in one API call.  Or bringing back Accounts and for each Account, bringing back all of the related Contacts.
• SOQL enhancements.  We're adding support for order by, IN, count(), and limit
• SOSL enhancements.  SOSL will get order by, as well as relationship support
• Upsert with relationships.  This feature is one of my favorites.  It allows you to relate records to each other, using an external identifier.  A simple example is loading contacts and associating contacts to the account.  Today this requires knowing the Salesforce.com AccountId.  With this feature, all you need to know is the External Identifier on the Account (for example, the DUNS identifier)
• New Dataloader.  Support for upsert, and also connectivity to databases via JDBC
• Merge API - The ability to merge Accounts, Contacts or Leads through the API
• New verbs queryall (query data from the recycle bin) and undelete.
• Real-time messaging, or outbound messaging.   Register for web service notifications through workflow, and we'll send you notifications over web services

So hopefully you can see why we're so excited about our Winter release, and the API 8.0!  We'll be posting more information about these as the week goes on.