Salesforce.com Winter ‘06 Released
Saturday, January 7th 2006 | Ismael Ghalimi
Salesforce.com Winter ‘06 was released last night. Among other improvements, a new user interface, AppExchange and recurring events, a trivial but highly useful feature. Salesforce.com presented this upgrade as a major one, and indeed AppExchange makes it a big deal. Nevertheless, the upgrade was absolutely seamless, as we shall see later in the post.
The new user interface certainly looks nicer, as in more pleasing to the eye, but I am not sure that it will bring any significant productivity improvement, which should be the primary goal with any user interface improvement project. AJAX is used only in rare places and in an inconsistent fashion. Display real estate is managed in a less conservative manner, requiring a larger screen to show the same information as before. I also wish that ‘Quick Create’ controls were available for all objects on all pages, instead of being displayed for some objects only and in an apparently random manner across the application. Nevertheless, I still believe that Salesforce.com remains a lot more usable from a user interface standpoint than competitive offerings such as NetSuite for example.
AppEchange is now officially available and will make the installation of third-party applications much easier than before. I have been using DreamTeam as an online alternative to Microsoft Project for a couple of months now, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that the application is still working with the new release. AppExchange is what makes Salesforce.com a true platform, and as such what makes this Winter ‘06 release one of the most important ones.
This brings me to the main point of the post, which is that overall, this upgrade has been totally painless. Beside one visual discrepancy found in the display of custom dashboards on the home page and fixed in less than a minute, everything else worked as before. All my data was still there, but most importantly, all the customizations I made on objects, workflows and applications were carried forward automatically. This pain-free upgrade process is what makes Software as a Service so attractive to companies from a Total Cost of Ownership standpoint, and Salesforce.com is delivering on the vision in a spectacular manner.
I’m loving it!
Entry filed under: Office 2.0, SaaS
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I enjoyed your posts on GTD and Office 2.0. I too am a GTD’er and a Salesforce.com admin. As such, I was really disappointed with the new UI. My initial reaction is that the new interface is _less_ productive than the old one, but I’m giving it another week before I change back. Am I the only one who feels this way?
Bryan,
I have mixed feelings too and am using the same strategy as you are. Time will tell. Also, please feel free to send requests for improvements as comments to this post, and I will make sure to forward them to the people I know at Salesforce.com.
Thanks for the post. Part of the AppExchange launch was also a number of key applications. We developed 70 plus best practice applications in a number of categories: Sales Quoting, Partner Management, Marketing Budget Management and more. You should test drive and install some of them. Start with the Channel Funds application.
http://www.appexchange.com
[…] No painful software upgrade. When your applications are served by online service providers, someone else is doing software upgrades for you, and if you carefully select your providers, such upgrade can be totally painless, as was related in this post. […]
The new user interface of Salesforce.com is much better than the one of NetSuite. I used NetSuite for one year. The features of NetSuite were not easy to understand. I then switched to Salesforce.com. The difference was huge. I quickly became a Salesforce.com expert. What is more, NetSuite does not have anything like AppExchange. So much more functionality is available to the users of Salesforce.com than NetSuite, and it is more accessible.
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