I’m not in San Francisco for Salesforce’s CloudForce event, I decided to come directly home after SXSW instead. Rather I’m watching the live stream on Facebook – while the beer and party may only be virtual, the stream fidelity is pretty good otherwise. Anyway – two big announcements today, the full integration of Rypple and the launch of Site.com. First some detail;

Rypple

Only six weeks after acquiring the product, Salesforce is aggressively taking it to SAP and SuccessFactors and rolling out a fully integrated Rypply HR product that includes;

  • Salesforce Rypple for Salesforce: Salesforce customers will be able to motivate their teams by giving them Thanks directly from within Salesforce on leads, accounts and more. For example, a salesperson will be able to give Thanks to a customer service agent for providing great service to a customer, or a sales manager will be able to give Thanks to a sales rep for closing a deal. These Thanks will appear in a person’s Salesforce Chatter feed, providing managers and peers with visibility into achievements in real-time. In addition, all recognition a person receives will become part of their social profile in Salesforce, allowing people to build their reputation at work and colleagues to identify experts.
  • Salesforce Rypple for Chatter: Managers and teams will be able to create custom badges to recognize team and individual achievements. Appearing in the Chatter feed, others can see, comment on, or ‘like’ them. Whether finance awards a team for coming in under budget or an engineer is recognized for a critical new development, the combination of Salesforce Rypple and Chatter will help break down departmental silos and provide management with visibility into key contributions — all in the employee social network.

Rypple is available today at a price of $5/user/month

Site.com

Salesforce is luanching sites.com as a fully social cloud content management system that is designed to allow marketers to build and deliver consistent external brand expereinces. In particular site.com includes;

  • Template Driven Sites: Template driven styling ensures the brand experience is consistent across websites and public social networks, including Facebook.  By making it easy to update styling in one place, Salesforce Site.com allows marketers to be agile and consistent.
  • Drag-and-Drop Forms: With dynamic data-binding, Salesforce Site.com turns sites into highly scalable marketing machines, with drag and drop forms and data driven pages that are seamlessly integrated to Force.com and all Salesforce data.
  • Built-in Collaboration with Chatter: Salesforce Site.com users can now easily connect with R&D, sales, Web developers and even external entities such as creative agencies and design firms using Chatter. Open collaboration through the content development process makes it easier than ever to ensure the right message is delivered.
  • Multi-language: Salesforce Site.com makes it easy to localize and publish websites and content on an integrated content delivery network.  Marketers can now scale their message globally, in multiple languages.

Sites is available today and has a relatively complex pricing scheme where it charges per site and per website developer user. The price of a stood up site is $1,500 USD per month and can be purchased either on its own or as part of a broader salesforce package.

Quick Analysis

Rypple allows salesforce to really push bottom-up adoption, it’s a tool that will truly deliver salesforce product to all employees in an organization in a similar way to what Chatter did. However while Chatter is a communication fabric that lays over existing processes and products, Rypple is a core application and hence introduces a new and interesting twist. Site.com drive the salesforce marque outside of the organization and will encourage broader salesforce adoption by driving the benefits of a fully integrated approach from marketing to prospecting to sales close.

Site is unlikely to gain significant following outside of core salesforce customers but this is OK since much of the value that an integrated CMS can drive is in the extension of coverage over the sales process – with site.com organizations have the ability to fully integrated the tracking and analysis of a customer from the very earliest stages of the relationship.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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