Salesforce stresses usability with Sales Cloud additions

SAN FRANCISCO: Salesforce has concentrated on usability enhancements in updates to its flagship Sales Cloud 2 product.

Tim Barker, senior director of products at Salesforce, claimed that, while the updates to the cloud application are small, customers are very excited by the news.

"An outsider may have wondered why the announcements caused so much whooping and clapping, but it is because they are all focused on usability," he said.

Barker was referring to the applause given to Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff when he delivered his annual Dreamforce conference keynote to users and developers on Wednesday morning in San Francisco.

The audience cheered when Benioff announced the new Cloud Scheduler functionality, which will allow users to set up meetings from within a contact record with drag-and-drop simplicity.

There was another large round of applause when Benioff announced the new Charting and Report Builder, which he claimed would make it easier for companies to analyse dashboards and reports.

Users will have access to new chart types, colour options and data hovers to get faster insights from dashboards, Benioff said.

Customers will also be able to drill down to specific subsets of chart data by clicking on chart sub-sections, like a specific wedge of a pie chart.

Salesforce has also made it easier to create reports by allowing users to drag in a new column or field, and instantly see the impact on the report.

Finally, Dreamforce saw the launch of a Salesforce for Twitter feature that will let sales and marketing professionals tap into Twitter conversations and turn the micro-bloggers into customers by tweeting back to interested prospects.

The sales representatives can also track the tweets they send to customers from their contact record, said the firm.

The Sales Cloud 2 enhancements received a warmer response from the audience than Benioff's launch of a major new collaboration cloud called Salesforce Chatter.