Last week at DreamForce, the sf.com user community get together, there were several large announcements. Perhaps the most important one was force.com Sites, sf.com's latest addition to their offering. First let me say that this is good idea for salesforce.com. The addition of a Web Content Management System and web hosting that is already connected to the salesforce backend is a natural fit for one of cloud computing's original companies. What's the benefit to the customer? Well, you will have the ability to bring up your site using the (as yet untested) web content management system and map it to your own domain. Then, without writing code, you can connect your site to your salesforce.com account. Some of the uses for your new connection, and I am just working from NetSuite experience: Log support cases from an online form into the sf.com database; capture online leads directly into the database; use it for any other custom records that your business maintains. The uses are really only limited by what you need to operate. Phil Wainewright has a good analysis here. This was a positive announcement for sf.com and NetSuite. How so? NetSuite has been doing this for the last 11 years. They have a fully developed web content management system used by thousands of companies and it is inextricably integrated with the same database you use with your NetSuite account. Not only can we capture the support cases, new leads and whatever custom records you might have, but we can look up real-time inventory, enter billable/payable time and expenses, create new featured products and services, sell downloadable files, and on and on. This is the single most important piece of the NetSuite pie to me because it is the lynchpin between the accounting and inventory backend and the customer facing front end. The more important announcement for me was the one back in April where sf.com came out with the native integration between salesforce app and Google Apps. This is an important development and gives sf.com something that no other large cloud platform that I know of has; namely, integration between two very important cloud application vendors with no effort from user clients. For me this is an important integration and one that NetSuite should emulate as soon as possible. The fact that a sf.com client can use google apps to share a document among several internal and external users and keep the version control, etc, is an huge improvement over the email distribution with attachments alternative. You can see more here: Sf.com and Google. | 
