Mobile access is becoming an increasingly important element to just about all web/software services. It’s going to continue to be an important for services to stay competitive. That goes for CRM products. Just a couple weeks ago, for example, at MacWorld iWorld, Elements CRM announced an iPad version.

Microsoft says Dynamics CRM will be available for “virtually any device with a new cloud-based, cross-platform, native mobile client service for Windows Phone 7, iPad, iPhone, Android and BlackBerry mobile devices.” That’s access to complete functionality of the product, mind you.

“In today’s hyperconnected world, customers need to be able to access their business-critical data on the device of their choice from wherever they are,” said Dennis Michalis, GM of the product. “These advancements, combined with the strength of the Microsoft platform, make Microsoft Dynamics CRM an obvious choice for any business.”

The update will also include enhanced social functionality and new enterprise-class features, as well as multiple web browser options (IE, Chrome, Firefox, Safari), the company says.

Pricing will start at $30 per user, per month. That includes support of up to three devices per user.

A preview is available here.

The company, which has a popular version for Mac, has taken the same look and feel, and applied it to iPad app form.

“With Elements CRM for the iPad, you are literally able to carry your CRM around with you while you conduct your business. It’s just amazing! Since there is no syncing of your data, your team back at the office will see your changes automatically. This is all thanks to the Element CRM Cloud” said Justin Bartak, CEO of Ntractive. “Our customers have been asking for an iPad version of Elements CRM for a while and today we are happy to deliver on that request.”

The app doesn’t require any syncing, as all content is in the cloud.

Small business pricing starts at $25 per user per month. The pro version is $45 per user per month. The mobile add-on pricing starts at $10 per user per month.

“The explosion of social technologies has changed the game for customer service,” said Alex Dayon, executive vice president of CRM at Salesforce. “Facebook and Twitter taught consumers to expect social customer service in real time.”

The product also has built-in social analytics. Companies can monitor and manage customer interactions across social channels with real-time reports and customizable dashboards. Salesforce says these things will help agents identify trends and alert managers of issues that are impacting the business.

The emerging tablet market should play into the always-on social customer interaction approach. Salesforce seems to be pretty hyped up for the iPad 2.

Service Cloud 3 is generally available today with Twitter support. Salesforce for Facebook is scheduled for the first quarter of fiscal year 2012. Radian6 for Salesforce is scheduled the third quarter of fiscal year 2012. Update: Radian6 product manager Ryan Strynatka says in the comments, “Radian6 for Salesforce – we are shooting for general availability by August (in time for Dreamforce) and will be including support for Facebook as well.”

"Sales professionals are at the heart of almost every successful business," said Ballmer. "Microsoft Dynamics CRM redefines productivity by offering an industry-leading product that is fully embracing the cloud. The things that make Microsoft Dynamics CRM an industry leader include giving sales professionals a familiar user experience, enabling greater collaboration, streamlining of processes and access to real-time data so they can improve their customers’ experiences and effectively compete in the market."

"The service is available today as a cloud offering," he said. "This is the first time we’ve made a release in the cloud before we have done so in the server version, and I think that really reflects the push by Microsoft into the cloud."

"I think our customers are really going to embrace this new release," he added. "It brings with it the ease of use that sales, marketing and service professionals expect; the ease of deployment for departmental managers; low cost and agility for IT; and most importantly, the kind of functionality, capability and value that’s really going to drive revenue and drive customer satisfaction."

The company points out that people who use Facebook through a mobile device are twice as active on the site than non-mobile users (according to IDC), and that mobile devices are beconing "the new enterprise desktop" for over 50% of the workforce. With these things in mind, Chatter Mobile should be a significant part of Chatter’s future. 

"Chatter Mobile means you can know what is happening in your entire enterprise, wherever you are," said Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. "The combination of devices like the iPad or the new iPod touch with mobile apps like Chatter that push information to you in real-time are making the desktop obsolete."

Salesforce launched Chatter in June and there are already about 20,000 companies using it, according to Salesforce. In addition to that, Salesforce has already had 250,000 downloads from the Apple App Store and 100,000 from BlackBerry App World for its CRM apps. 

Chatter Mobile is free to Salesforce CRM and Force.com subscribers. The apps will be available later this year for BlackBerry, iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. The Android app will be out in early 2011.

A spokesperson for Salesforce tells WebProNews today’s announcement is significant for the following reasons:

- Breadth: With Jigsaw Inside, sales and marketing professionals will get  real-time access to the world’s largest socially generated database, including 22 million business contacts and 4 million company profiles.

- Resolution: Companies spend more than $3 billion a year struggling to keep pace with changes across sales and marketing operations by augmenting legacy data services and data management. Jigsaw Inside will solve marketers’ pain points around decayed, duplicated and dead data by delivering relevant, accurate business information in the cloud without the need for hardware or software.

"CRM systems are only as good as the information inside them," said Kevin Akeroyd, general manager, Jigsaw. "With Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM, customers can be alerted to changes in contacts through Chatter in real-time. This degree of operational agility is only possible with Jigsaw’s data in the cloud."

Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM is now generally available and starts at $29 per user per month.

Salesforce bought Jigsaw for $142 million earlier this year.

"The marketplace will allow customers to quickly search, discover and apply industry-specific applications and solution extensions from Microsoft and its partners to help them accelerate and extend their CRM and ERP implementations," the company explains. "Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace will be integrated within Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, allowing customers to search for applications directly from within their CRM solution."

"Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 will further deliver ‘The Power of Productivity’ through familiar, intelligent and connected experiences for customers and partners," says Brad Wilson, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. "For customers, it offers new levels of user productivity and collaboration that meet their specific business needs with a low total cost of ownership. For partners, it unlocks new opportunities and provides a single development environment for cloud-based and on-premise deployments. Together, this new release raises the bar in the CRM market."

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 will be released in online form before software form, as Microsoft is heavily pushing the cloud.

Swensrud explained this concept of "Cloud 2", which is an internal term the company has been using, and basically refers to the next generation of cloud computing, which stems from the rise in general social media use and mobile/smartphone use, where people are accessing the Internet more from their pocket, as opposed to their desktop. Salesforce sees its strategy as "accelerating the market shift" to Cloud 2, which it says is "inherently social, collaborative and delivers real-time access to data and information across new mobile devices."

Swensrud tells us that since the company formed in 1999, they’ve been taking many of the leading trends on the web and applying them to the enterprise. Chatter is simply an extension of this. In fact, Swensrud says the company’s mantra now is along the lines of "Why doesn’t all enterprise software work like Facebook?"

Milestone

One announcement Salesforce is making today is that Chatter has achieved a new milestone of 500 companies in its private beta, with another 1,000 companies on the waiting list, and it will be coming to all customers later this year.

With the Force.com platform, users began using Facebook-style collaboration technology, Swensrud says, and users started thinking, "why don’t we have the same-style collaboration in all business apps – not just CRM app – basically, anything that runs inside of a company?"

That’s why Salesforce is allowing companies to build Cloud 2 apps with Force.com, Swensrud says. It will run all over the web and have all the features of Chatter. Companies can "Chatterize" any app they build with Force.com – Cloud 2 apps.

20 companies are going live with such apps right away.

AppExchange2 and ChatterExchange

Salesforce today is also introducing AppExchange2, a new version of its market place for cloud business apps, with a new category of social enterprise apps – the ChatterExchange, which will include the apps from the 20 companies and others that get built in the future. This can be found at appexchange.com/chatter

Service Cloud Goes Chatter

A big part of Salesforce’s announcement is that Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud 2 is going Social with Chatter. The company has extended the Chatter private beta to more than 250 Service Cloud 2 customers. Salesforce says that in combining the Service Cloud and Chatter, companies can boost productivity gains by empowering service agents with new capabilities for:

- Monitoring Priority Cases: Service agents can stay on top of high priority cases, updates to critical knowledge articles, and the latest product updates

- Sales-Service Alignment: Service agents and sales reps can share the latest case and opportunity updates for their customer to ensure good service means good business

Swensrud says the companies in this private beta range in all sizes and across industries, with the largest being in the Fortune 500. ServiceCloud2, he says allows companies to not only communicate with customers via social networks and search engines, but when they receive customer inquiries, they can now use Chatter to work with all the departments within the company to sort things out.

Salesforce Chatter will be included in all paid editions of Salesforce CRM and Force.com. Service Cloud 2 is available now and pricing starts at $65 per user per month. AppExchange 2 and ChatterExchange are live today, and customers should contact partners for pricing and availability of their applications.

"Content, applications and people will now have profiles, feeds and groups, enabling them to be deeply connected," she tells WebProNews. "In addition, developers will now be able to use the Salesforce Chatter platform to build social enterprise applications, and all 135,000 native Force.com applications will instantly become social."

Salesforce Chatter lets users collaborate securely in real time with:

- Profiles
- Status updates
- Feeds
- Groups
- Social Apps
- Social Content (docs, spreadsheets, presentations, etc.)
- Social Sharing Model
- Twitter and Facebook
- AppExchange (apps build on Force.com platform)
- Mobile (available for BlackBerry, Windows Mobile device and iPhone)

The Salesforce Chatter social platform includes a rich set of pre-built social components. Developers will be able to add profiles, status updates, groups functionality, feeds, and social content to apps. There is a set of APIs that let developers push data from any app into Chatter feeds, and there are Google, Facebook, and Twitter developer toolkits.

Salesforce Chatter will launch in 2010, and will be included in all paid editions of Salesforce CRM and Force.com. A new Chatter Edition will be sold for $50 per user, per month and will include Salesforce Chatter, Salesforce Content, and Force.com.

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"Flash Builder for Force.com is a jointly developed IDE that provides a single, powerful tool for building cloud-based RIAs, which can easily be deployed to end users through the browser using the Adobe Flash Player or directly to the desktop via Adobe AIR," explains Michelle Perkins on the Adobe Flash Platform blog. "This tight integration enables client-side data management and synchronization between cloud and client, simplifying the development of applications that seamlessly run online or offline across operating systems and devices, while taking full advantage of the proven scalability, security and reliability of the Force.com platform."

You can get an idea of what the product is about in the following introduction video.

Features include:

- Professional Eclipse-based IDE, unifying Adobe Flash Builder and the Force.com IDE into a common, highly productive environment for building a variety of Force.com applications.

- Pre-built integration with Adobe LiveCycle Data Services for client-side data management and synchronization services, automatically synchronizing data between the Force.com database and an Adobe AIR secure local data store on the client, allowing developers to build apps that seamlessly span connected and disconnected environments.

Final delivery for the product is expected to go down in the first half of next year. A developer preview version is currently available at the Salesforce developer site.

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