News

Salesforce.com Launches Developer Conference

• By David Kopf
• May 10, 2007

Salesforce.com is one of the larger providers of customer relationship management (CRM) solutions to the enterprise market that uses hosted Web services instead of the traditional customer-premises installed approach.

Highlighting the event will be a keynote speech by Macintosh marketeer Guy Kawasaki -- managing director of Silicon Valley seed-stage and early-stage investment firm Garage Technology Ventures (Palo Alto, Calif.). In addition, there will be discussions on developing the next generation of on-demand business apps from Marc Benioff, chairman & CEO of salesforce.com, and Parker Harris, EVP of technology for salesforce.com.

After the keynotes, the day-long event will break into three tracks:

Track one provides an introduction to Salesforce.com's Apex Platform for creating, customizing, deploying and integrating CRM; a discussion Apex's future; and an application walk-through demonstrating how to use Apex to build a time-off management application.

Track two will focus on mashups with Salesforce.com technology, such as leveraging Apex's Flex Toolkit to build rich user interfaces; the Apex Web services API; and how to pair Google's APIs with Apex to build new apps.

Track three will cover business topics such as Salesforce.com's strategy for marketing on-demand apps; winning techniques and strategies for succeeding on AppExchange, Salesforce.com's on-demand application directory; and how to leverage Managed Packages technology on AppExchange.

Each of the tracks will let developers interact with members of Salesforce.com's R&D teams to learn how to develop apps. The day also features a luncheon and developer lab.

Registration costs nothing for the event, which Salesforce.com says will attract hundreds of developers and entrepreneurs. Additional information and tools are available at the Apex Developer Network.