My apologies for the spotty posting and test posts. Beth’s linking brought more subscribers than I anticipated during this soft launch.  I’ve been back from San Francisco almost a week now, but I feel like I’m just surfacing.  I was hoping to do a more formal launch of this blog at the conference – and post much more during the conference than I did – but I was having some technical difficulties with Wordpress…so there you have it.

A few DF roundups:

• Steve Andersen captures the week well in his wrap-up post
• Jenny Council did a great report out of the post-npsf summit meeting
• Everyone is looking for CRM consultants in the sector
• I posted a few of my take-aways

I plan on doing a broader announcement sometime soon. If you are reading this via RSS, please spread the word (and contact me if you are interested in blogging here about salesforce).

Upwards of 300 people from nonprofits and nonprofit supporting businesses are at Dreamforce this year – a far cry from the few of us here only a couple years ago.  Lots of new features being announced – Visualforce.com and rebranding of the platform: Force.com.

As usual, great networking and reconnecting, which is making it awfully quiet in the Meebo back channel.  

Michael Dannenfeldt, the Salesforce Foundation Fellow (on loan from Salesforce corp) has announced a new Resource Page for nonprofits on the Foundation’s website. And in traditional Salesforce fashion, they are very coy with information on nonprofit pricing for new functions (visualforce and apex) as well as additional support services.

Good questions coming from attendees in nonprofit session about pricing, as well as company/foundation support of the nonprofit template and nonprofit-specific platform issues. The foundation and the vertical – as they were at the summit in early June – still uncertain (tight lipped more likely) about their strategy/roadmap for ongoing support to the community.

To be continued…

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Salesforce.com is slated to announce its new custom application development platform next week at Dreamforce, according to TechCrunch. Not only is there some great opportunity here for nonprofits to finally have an accessible web development tool that tightly integrates with backend sf.com data, but one of our own, the Bronx School, is one of the beta testers.  The big question is - just like APEX: Will sf.com donate or reduce costs of this service to nonprofits, schools and government agencies, like they have for their CRM platform?

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I’ve been sitting on the idea for nonprofitcrm.org for some time now.  With Dreamforce in a couple days seems like a good as time as any to launch this baby.  Salesforce.com and the Salesforce Foundation are really ramping up their nonprofit (and government/education) offerings this year. Not to mention a great social calendar to boot…for those that have attended NTC in the last couple years, you will not be disappointed by the parties in SFO.

The Foundation has kindly created a portal for all the sessions and events for nonprofit participants on their website. I created a Meebo back channel (http://www.meebo.com/room/npsf/ ) and an SMS alert system which I encourage you to join and connect through.

I look forward to seeing you there.

A little biz: If you are a sf.com practitioner in the nonprofit sector and are interested in writing on this blog, please contact me: sonnycloward (at) gmail (dot) com. 

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