Revolutionising your mobile workforce
Doug Farber
29/09/2008

Mobile access to business applications is giving mobile knowledge workers increasing levels of functionality and flexibility and increasingly so, in the attractive form factor that they desire. The newly announced availability of salesforce.com’s CRM applications and Force.com platform on Apple’s App Store gives enterprises a new suite of mobile business applications delivered when and where their users need them.

If you are looking at revolutionising your mobile workforce, the following are five things salesforce.com has now unlocked on your gleaming new iPhone:

1. Plug in your business
The Apple iPhone SDK has enabled salesforce.com to build a Salesforce Mobile client application for the iPhone. This will enable any natively built Force.com application developed by your company to be quickly and easily deployed to the iPhone.

2. One stop shop for your shop
Automate additional business processes in your company with salesforce.com using free applications available on the AppExchange. Many popular applications such as Expense Reports, Time Tracking, Recruiting and project management are all available at www.appexchange.com for you to browse, test-drive and install. So now you can access Salesforce CRM and many other business applications directly from your iPhone.

3. Create a knowledge-driven mobile workforce
Salesforce takes empowering your workforce with information a step further by tagging information such as leads and sales opportunities. Information such as industry and competitor information related to a sales opportunity for example can also be fed to your workforce using Salesforce Content. The documents will show up as a list for easy access on the iPhone.

4. Build applications in the cloud
Developers building applications natively on Force.com can now deliver them on the iPhone without writing any extra code. Similarly, businesses will be able to quickly mobilise and access their custom Force.com applications on the iPhone taking the business straight into the Web 2.0 realm.

5. Connect your business with your partners
You can connect your deployment of Salesforce to your partners’ deployment allowing you to share data with partners and collaborate on sales opportunities. Sharing data with other companies is as easy as connecting to someone on LinkedIn or sharing pictures of Flickr.

In summary, the availability of Salesforce Mobile application on the iPhone has opened up a whole new window of opportunity for businesses. Organisations of all sizes can now have access to a new universe of mobile applications to run their enterprises. With its powerful features and intuitive user interface, the iPhone is slated to accelerate the mobile business application revolution.

- Doug Farber is Vice President Operations, Asia Pacific, salesforce.com.

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