Dreamforce 2011: Cloud Computing, Apps, and More

Antigone Peyton September 6, 2011 Tweet

Last week, 45,000 Salesforce users, developers, administrators, and C-level visionaries met at the Moscone Conference Center in San Francisco to swap information and learn about the latest Salesforce offerings and apps available on its platforms. Welcome to Dreamforce 2011.

The conference was packed with keynote discussions about the computing past (primarily the PC era) and the future of cloud computing and collaborative technologies like Salesforce’s Chatter app.  (You can expect to see the keynote videos on YouTube this week from the likes of Gary Vaynerchuk, Charlene Yi, Marc Benioff, Eric Schmidt among many others.)

Information tracks that catered to administrators, small businesses, and others that are integrated into the Salesforce family provided a lot of valuable information that I am still trying to process. Plus, Hubspot was giving away free unicorns….

The future, it seems, will include apps that help individuals and companies use social media technologies to share information and make sense of the massive data overload we face – and find the golden needles in the haystack.  Oh wait, we are already there.

We run a good portion of our law practice on apps built on the Force.com platform. Why use plain ol’ email when you can use social media apps to share information, calendar, and run projects? It’s totally changed our processes and business. Salesforce is, indeed, a social enterprise in the cloud.

It was evident at the conference that the Salesforce community is a close-knit and vibrant one, and people are always willing to share tips and tricks. I’ll be delving into the Radian6 acquisition and some cool Force.com apps in future posts. Suffice it to say, Salesforce’s future is looking bright.