Yesturday I went to DreamForce the Salesforce.com conference..the thing is that it is a meta-conference… a sales conference about sales.
The Nonprofit Track: It was great to see my nonprofit tech buddies, Steve who runs the Sales Force Foundation, Katrin who is the leader of the Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network, Leda from Dot Organize, a new friend Khadijah from MassCOSH (the Massachusets Coalition for Ocupational Saftey and Health). She had a great story of frustration that speaks to the reality…she went with Drupal and and was optimistic about the potential of the platform but was totally disappointed by the tool and the ability to MAKE IT WORK well for her organizational context. As she said we are hoping this group of 19 year old developers will improve the platform…Well the fact is they haven’t really done it and disappointed a lot of folks. (I had high hopes too invested some money in customizing it for my constituents..but it never really got there). She was like SalesForce saved my ass. It is so good and I can get my 8 staff who need to use it to use it. She believes in open source still but needs it to work now…SalesForce solves that problem.
I got up and asked during the first session the first question…basically why should we trust SalesForce.com – why trust a big company with all my sensitive organizational data and what if they get acquired and change the relationship between the foundation and the company – making it not ‘free’ (for the first 10 seats). The response like – we are good people, the foundation is now part of the culture of the company, if they changed it …you would all get upset and cause a pr stir, trust is built over time and we have been doing this for 7 years.
The thing that really got me to shift was my conversation (later in the day) with David Donica the Information Technology Specialist for the Jefferson Economic Development Institute. I don’t know if you have heard of the stat of Jefferson but I am a big fan. It goes from ‘real’ Northern California into Southern Oregon. It is part of Cascadia that I broadly identify with. Jeffersonians are of course strongly independent so the fact that he trusts Salesforce with their data meant something.
In terms of identity related topics in this track one of the women asked .. ‘ how can my donors manage their bio’s or contact information on their own and just have it update’ This question resonated with a lot of folks. I offered up that the user-centric identity community was working on the solution to that problem. I talked to Steve a bit about it…he was like well we can just build that into App Exchange – I said well really it is going to live outside of that … the donors have an identity that they manage somewhere and it can talk to the nonprofit organizations they donate to. He got that it would be ‘outside’ their system and that it would be a good thing to have happen.
I got to seek Dick’s talk about Sxip Access it was a good talk and I think a great product for the problem it is solving. It helps the Enterprise Directory talk to ASP’s outside the enterprise ‘wall.’ This is a huge market and as more and more Office 2.0 ASP offerings are made it will only increase in demand. I case you were wondering Dick is still using the Viagra metaphor to talk about these subjects.
There were at least four office 2.0 applications at the conference and I talked with all of them about OpenID2 (Jive, INetOffice, ScanR, another one).
The internet cafe…was an uncafe. They had no terminals for you to use to check e-mails (I left my laptop at home). They had a rock concert by Train (I had never heard of them) in the evening and an openbar for like 4 hours (from like 6-the rock concert ended at like 10). It was very dot comish and people were commenting on that.
The product that seemed most interesting from an identity perspective was Domodomain that does ip analysis of the traffic coming to your website to let you know from where they are coming.
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