As you might already know I’m in SF for the Dreamforce ‘06 conference. I had petitioned to go to this conference a while back when the task of integrating salesforce with our systems (namely an AS/400) was given to me months back. The sole reason was just to learn how to make my hat as the salesforce administrator easier to wear. After this morning, it’s going to be a lot harder then I had imagined.

Not because the tasks that I currently have are hard to manage, that not it at all it’s actually very easy, the problem is Salesforce is so much more then what I thought it could/would be used for, especially within our company.

This morning’s Keynote with CEO Marc Benioff was fantastic. Side note, Micheal Dell video conference in as well to share a little, not too interesting but I might as well name drop him in there. One of the major announcements this morning was Apex.

Apex is a programming language in order to leverage the entire system of salesforce however you want. Not a big deal if you imagine Salesforce as strictly a CRM, like I had until recently. A CRM is Customer Relation Management. We currently use it now to track every sales-order and keep track of leads and opportunities, all sales information. Other things you can do that are more notable would be marketing and support. What Salesforce can do that I didn’t know is Everything. It’s truly and open “on-demand” system to do anything you would normally need a server and a DB for. Salesforce has had open APIs for a while in order to create mash-ups and the like but with Apex you could essentially use Salesforce for any custom application you want for any business activity, easier. I have to say easier because you have been able to make your own application in Saleforce for a year or so but now you can fully customize every action a certain button makes for example, instead of the delete button just deleting you can make it perform any back-end action before the deletion is made.

Something that Sf has done for a year is AppExchange a place where developers can post their custom apps and you can use those to integrate and include in Sf. The majority are mash-ups because the current API is fairly limited to integration but with the Winter release and the new ApeX Sf users are going to see a lot of new apps. Since AppExchange let’s anyone publish their app, I could create a custom app in ApeX and publish it for all. An open source community as you will for everyone to share and customize at will.

Sf is doing a lot for devs too. As a future dev myself, I’m going to learn the ApeX for work and hopefully have a few good ideas and develop them. I have high hopes as you can tell. One thing I thought was crazy that Mark announced was a…for the lack of a better term…dev warehouse. Sf bought a huge building with a bunch of cubes and devs can rent out the space and start developing products for Sf. And their not doing it for the property management, their doing it for the dev. They plan on having expert dev meetings and dev sessions for the in house devs to grow by. What a cool idea, I don’t think I’d ever imagine any top 40 software provider to do something this “innovative”.

One other cool thing I found out today was ideas.salesforce.com which essentially is a place for you to write down what you want Sf to do or even a developer to pick up and do for themselves. A great way for everyone to put there input in, especially since it incorporates the digg model and you “promote” ideas so the Sf devs will notice them more.

I don’t even know why this excites me since it is work, it may be because this is a “turning point” for all of use business users. We’ve already seen what an online project management can do in Basecamp but what about being able to create your own basecamp within Salesforce with all of your other information. Or involve your e-commerce solution within Sf in order to have essentially one giant DB that stores all of your digital records and assets. And it’s brought to you in an entirely new business model, pitched as “on demand”.

I’m so sold on Sf right now, I’m jazzed to be a Sf admin right now because this where it’s at in my opinion. In 5 years 40-50% of all software is going to be ondemand. And for me to be able to learn hwo to administer this system, create new programs and learn the programming langauge is going to be very cool.