Wow!  That word hardly describes the DreamForce event this year.  SalesForce really did it up nice, although the food could have had a few more selections. 

SalesForce has finally passed the $1B mark in sales and it was clear by the attendance (19,000!!!!) that they've garnered a lot of support by businesses both large and small.  I thought for sure the economy would have had a bigger impact on the event, and maybe it did, but attendance was exceptional regardless. 

One of the best signs I saw this year is that the Force.com and Sites message is really hitting home.  What's more CIOs and CTOs are embrasing the technology and saving money.  Marc Benioff touted the following from an IDC report - 54% savings ($), 5 times faster (time to implementation).  Having worked with the platform and delivered in excess of 40 full lifecycle projects myself, I have seen similar results. 

What's more, a lot of companies are realizing how much more quickly changes can get implemented on the platform, although I will caveat this by saying it depends heavily on the quality of your implementation and the experience of your implementation team.

This year we saw the power of building applications in the cloud as a number of companies are going wild with Force.com.  We also saw some awesome demonstrations of companies like Avon that have deep integration with Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Salesforce has even jumped on the Social agenda by releasing Chatter.  Chatter is a new cloud service that is slated for release Spring '10 with more features to follow.  (More on this in a later post.)  Chatter brings to the Enterprise a way to expose social data and feeds to the organization in a secure manner.  I hate to admit this, but it took me a while to see the value of this tool until I'd seen several different use cases.  It's game changing!  This tool will allow organizations to move sales through the pipeline faster and with more unstructured information.

Some other game changes I saw were around the use of Knowledge Bases.  Organizations may struggle to see what's happening in Social media around their product.  Salesforce has made some investments to allow the Service Cloud to integrate social media directly into the KB creation and publishing process.  This is clearly a game changer because it gives a wider view of product inefficiencies and provides the ability to address from the organization rather than customers simply relying on the good graces of social media sites.

One other feature I saw, that I knew about prior to Dream Force, but is worth mentioning here is around Content.  The whole functionality in Content is about providing the right information to customers.  Things like building a custom pitch deck (in PowerPoint) right in the UI from slides found using search in Content area in Salesforce.  Standardize your slide templates across the organization, share them up online, and suddenly, the sales teams have a whole new way to build pitch decks.  What's more they can be package with many different documents and published for viewing online by the customer... and this content viewing is trackable in Salesforce so reps can see how many times the content is viewed online and can get a notice when a customer views it.  All awesome features.

I attended a number of the developer sessions so I'll be following this post with a number of blogs on the developer features including one on the newly released Chatter. 

Truely, this was an awesome Dream Force...