Yesterday, Mozilla - the creators of the Firefox browser - released a  "Firefox lite" application called Prism, built specifically to run web applications. And it so rocks!!! Its fast, its browser compatible and it has some nice desktop integration features. I know that folks have been waiting for the Winter 08 release for sf.com to be compatible with the Windows version of Safari to increase speed and performance.  Wait no longer…this is a great alternative (although I still want to see how sf.com performs in Safari once its compatible).

A great way to automatically log into your sf.com instance is to add your username and password to the URL (which can be done with the bookmarks of your browser of choice as well): 

https://www.salesforce.com/login.jsppw=PASSWORD&un=NAME@domain.org

After saving your Prism app, it automatically creates a icon on your desktop, start menu and/or quick launch bar.  While its possible to create icons on your desktop to open web apps with any browser this just makes it all that much easier and user friendly. 

I’d imagine using Prism will help with much greater adoptability for the web app-phobic users we all know and love so well.  Let me know what you think.

UPDATE:  Steve Andersen found a pretty significant problem with Prism…those darn hovers don’t work properly. Then again, I should have noted this was not a full release…its still in "labs."

UPDATE 2: With Winter 08, Safari is the way to go. Still too many bugs in Prism.

I thought this presentation from Susan Harrison at the NYC Department of Education was really interesting about how they use Salesforce in the Bronx Lab School, and several other NYC Public schools.  The principal, Marc Sternberg, was brought on stage during Marc Benioff’s keynote at Dreamforce.

http://www.slideshare.net/mbaizman/doe-10407

By rob