Salesforce.com Inc. has improved on its well-designed hosted customer relationship management application through a number of new features that make information more accessible and useful.
Salesforce.com Inc. has improved on its well-designed hosted customer relationship management application through a number of new features that make information more accessible and useful.
Updated in December, the enterprise edition of Salesforce.com is priced at $125 per user per month and includes a large number of changes that improved the user experience in eWEEK Labs' tests. The most valuable improvement is the addition of a dashboard that graphically consolidates data into key metrics, while other layout improvements and new account and data management capabilities make for a more robust system.
Dashboard views are a crucial element Salesforce.com had lacked, especially when compared with rival hosted applications, such as Siebel Systems Inc.'s CRM OnDemand-UpShot Edition and NetSuite Inc.'s NetCRM. However, Salesforce.com's implementation, with all metrics grouped under a single tab, was a bit crowded. We'd rather see the Salesforce.com dashboard more closely mirror NetSuite's, which allows dashboard elements to be integrated within the user's home page.
Salesforce.com now includes a workflow engine so that an organization can create process rules for the sales and customer support teams. We liked this capability as a way to make sure that organizations adhere to process rules, with the end results focusing on tasks and events. This means that when an event triggers a rule, the workflow generates a task or alert for a particular user, with tasks appearing in the task list and alerts arriving via e-mail.
To read the full review from eWEEK, click here.
