"no software" - no sh*t!
Salesforce's marketing message has been on their pages boldly proclaiming "no software"...
Yesterday they proved it right; our sales department here was picking its toenails for two hours at one of the busiest times of the day and my back end systems threw errors left right and centre (because we absolutely *have* to send data real-time to salesforce so that it can be reported from *in* salesforce using the second worst reporting tool known to mankind -stand up Sage, you're #1 at something!)
It is *so pleasant* to be sat in the IS Operations Department when helpdesk request by helpdesk request the entire sales department tell you to make Salesforce work again. For some reason they don't seem to understand "sorry there's nothing we can do".
Any software professional who has had the pleasure of interfacing other systems to Salesforce will cringe with me as they think of the Customisations that their sales staff have made to the application which give you such a tingle when you are told "just send the numbers over"
The software has no concept of locking - having two people update the same "record" is _entirely_ possible without protection- may I strongly suggest to people that you don't hold monetary data in salesforce but put that safe in your back-end systems and report from there?
I will admit that its a clever piece of engineering - anything that can keep Sales Marketeers quiet whilst IT get on with the accounts systems is useful; but it has its limitations - one of which is that you rely upon this third party to keep their systems running; i don't care about an SLA when you can lose what is now a critical system and by its very nature, lose sales for a random amount of time,
Anyway - this is a "No Software" Sales Solution - where's the IT angle?