Dreamforce 2009 Predictions
Dreamforce 2009 is fast approaching. Last year’s big announcement was Force.com Sites, before that Visualforce, and Apex code before that. What could be the next big announcement for salesforce.com? Here are my predictions.
New UI
Salesforce.com as been working on a new UI for several years now. There was even a chance to get a sneak peak at last years Dreamforce and there have been little teasers scattered through out salesforce presentations for some time now. Salesforce.com leans heavily on the ext JS framework and I fully expect the new UI to boast some of the cooler features this javascript framework can deliver. Another reason I think this may finally be announced is that this new UI will be built upon Visualforce and for the past several months the Visualforce team, which is usually very active, has been laying low on the forums which makes me think this department is cooking up something good.
Visualforce 2.0
This one I am hoping for more than I actually think may happen but there are a few reason I think this announcement could be a possibility. In the past two to three salesforce releases there has been very little progress in regards to enhancements and new features for Visualforce. Similar to my justification for a new UI the VF team has been less involved in the forums so I can only assume they are very busy at work on the next big thing. Another piece of evidence is this one forum post in particular that I still haven’t forgot about: “we are working on visualforce native drag and drop support”, straight from the PM of Visualforce. Drag and drop is a pretty advanced thing to do with javascript so I am hoping there is a new suite of advanced Visualforce components that take advantage of all the cool things javascript can now do but maintains the simplicity and scalability that makes Visualforce so easy to use.
These are my two guesses for the big announcement but I also anticipate smaller announcements such as new partnerships and new integration toolkits, but these are boring.
Do you have any predictions for salesforce.com’s big announcement?
You know now that you mention it, we have seen very little improvements in Visualforce. I hope this is true!
I have a long-shot prediction. Salesforce will announce a pilot where the platform will run full-blown Java.
I have been waiting for Drag and drop for quite sometime now. Hope it is announced this dreamforce.
My guess for the surprise announcement would be discussion forum communities.
I would be surprised to see a major new UI from salesforce. They tend to be more incremental when it comes to end-user features. I’m sure they have been working on a new UI, as their current UI is very dated, but I bet they will roll it out in phases over time. I would love to be proven wrong.
I think the big announcement will be around social networking/collaboration/communities similar to what Mike said. They have been doing a lot of work in this area recently (twitter, facebook, google wave) and salesforce likes to ride the hype waves. This was hinted at by Parker Harris in an interview recently.
I also expect rebranding of Apex and VisualForce to “force.com code” and “force.com pages” based upon the dreamforce session names and hopefully some improvements will come to both.
Disregard my comment. SForce says their new user community was built by an outside implementation partner, and that there’s no immediate productization plans (although they’re happy to refer to the imp partner if you want something similar).
As a followup to my comment earlier, I noticed that twitter is now a Strategic Cloud Sponsor for dreamforce (http://www.salesforce.com/dreamforce/DF09/site/explore/sponsors/). I don’t think twitter would be there unless there is going to be a big joint announcement. Google is also a Strategic Cloud Sponsor, and could also be part of the announcement (Google Wave?), but Google and salesforce already have a well-established strategic relationship.
Twitter will eventually figure out how to launch a Twitter Pro service for ~$50 per year for managing “cases” tweeted about brands, potentially making SForce’s cloud service integration strategy obsolete.
Twitter and Google are both poised to become a new CRM alternative, so this may be more about keeping (potential) enemies close.
I wouldn’t be surprised to hear about a new partnership (last year was facebook) but, as a developer, these announcements are always lame and boring. I want to here about new features and products that I can use to make my product better. For the past three years salesforce.com has made some type of major product announcement and I hope this year is no different.