SalesForce will be shortly making another release with new and enhanced features.

You can take a sneak peak at the new features in the Summer ‘08 Admin Preview.
Here are some highlights from the coming release as singled out in the official SalesForce blog.

Visualforce -With Visualforce now generally available in every edition, it’s easy to build custom user interfaces using Visualforce and new custom components from the Force.com developer community.

Salesforce for Google Apps, a simple, yet powerful combination of your applications that work together and make it incredibly easy for users to communicate, collaborate, and share business information.

Also, the latest release schedule is available at trust.salesforce.com!

And a quick reminder for those who still doubt whether they can/should integrate non-SalesForce contact data (from various databases like Oracle, MySQL etc. and/or applications like Excel, QuickBooks etc.) into SalesForce account, just one word: Apatar.

In one of my previous posts I briefly mentioned the possibility of integrating the data received from CDYNE Demographics web service with your customer database and thus extending your customer information. Well, this is now officially possible with CDYNE Demographics connector for the Apatar Open Source Data Integration toolset. The new connector delivers statistical data about customers and allows organizations to identify the ethnic and socio-economic makeup of their current customer base or purchased marketing lists. Aside from that, the connector can be used with any contacts database to determine the age, race, income, as well as type of residence, median income, median house value, or median number of vehicles, all without coding.

Ideal for data modeling and marketing
Whether you need to build customized marketing campaigns and determine ethnic or socio-economic information, this new data quality service from Apatar and CDYNE can be used to tweak your product offerings or advertising messages to reach your desired target market. Non-profit organizations or companies relying on donor support can use this data to match other groups or geographic areas to these traits in order to expand membership base and increase donations and support.

The CDYNE Demographics Web service can help companies better select target groups and learn more about their customers. With Apatar’s visual drag-and-drop interface, this source of useful socio-economic information can be integrated with your database or CRM system in minutes.

You can learn more over here.

I wrote a lot about data cleansing and data quality as a one-time procedure and as a repeated practice. But here’s a catch, when do you usually think of and/or worry about the quality of your data? When migrating and integrating it? When using it in marketing? When building your strategy based on it? Has it ever crossed your mind that the quality of data needs to be thought through before it’s actually gathered? That’s new and you don’t see too many companies thinking of it…yet. We don’t quite realize that even at the early stages of preparing for data gathering and while obtaining it, data quality aleady plays an important role in the future of your company. It is the early stages that make a difference in how your data turns out and if. If approached properly from the very beginning, your data will surely pay off when you get to sharing and maintaining it, and especially when applying it.

Cost-wise, this approach is rather efficient too. Although I always say that corporate data is not the thing to save up on and it might not sound quite like me =), but investing in data quality from the very beginning would save up a lot when it comes to verification, cleansing and usage. Cleansing, as a matter of fact, may very well become redundant. Sweet?

There’s been a growth in user-generated content lately, where you have loads of information on your clients scattered all over different resources and it’s next to impossible to have it all in one place and look at it from a bird’s view. Well, what’s the point of trying to unify all this information on your own? What if it’s incomplete and redundant? However if you think of services like CDYNE Demographics that gather statistical data on your customers and provide you with a whole set of information that you can use in your marketing, it’s obvious that this problem is already being taken care of. You don’t need to look for that data in different Web sources. If tools like that are used wisely and integrated into your customer CRM (the type of integration Apatar will be offering shortly) this unstructured user data can become a global value for your company’s growth.

Apatar CEO Renat Khasanshyn is currently attending Interop-Software 2008 data integration conference in Las Vegas, NV. Hope you get a chance to meet him in person, if you happen to be there at the same time. If not, you can always check out Renat’s impressions of the conference in his blog.

And if you didn’t get to visit this Interop, you are just in time to register for the next one in Tokyo, Japan on 9-13 of June this year.

SugarCRM launches new capabilities.

SugarCRM Inc., the world’s leading provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software, announced the beta release of new reporting and wireless capabilities for SugarCRM. The new reporting and analytics engine provides SugarCRM users with improved insight into sales effectiveness and customer behavior. Revamped wireless capabilities deliver the feature-rich SugarCRM user experience on mobile phones, including support for the popular BlackBerry^® and iPhone mobile handsets.

Support for iPhone, huh? I can see a tendency… Everything and everyone goes “i” and mobile. Which isn’t bad, actually. The new wireless features include:

• Improved User Interface provides navigation into edit, detail, and list views, as well as the ability to access employee directory, store preferences and view recent items.
• Rich HTML Client delivers rich presentation of SugarCRM data through a standard Web browser.
• Device Independent allows users to view SugarCRM data from any PDA or smart phone, including the BlackBerry and iPhone.
• New Search Capabilities allow users to find information quickly with the press of a few buttons.

Come to think of it, with SugarCRM going wireless, and with Apatar  SugarCRM connector installed you can now have any of your database (SQL, Oracle) data up in SugarCRM and on your mobile device in practically no time. I love this integrated world!