This got me thinking about the Salesforce upgrade path over the last few years. One of the reasons I moved to work with the Salesforce platform was because of the constant upgrades, making the platform effectively future-proof. However, after an initial good start, adding useful features such as APEX and better reporting etc, I am losing the faith. The focus on adding new 'look at me' functionality as opposed to developing the core platform is frustrating.
Going back to my friends house, he has recently redone the kitchen and redecorated the bedrooms. Good. Rooms that are often used and every day. He can walk into those rooms and appreciate the work that has been done. I can imagine though that if he had got Mark Benioff free reign to improve his house he would be sitting with a bill for a back garden water amusement park, a carousel in the living room and a lap dancing bar to replace the bedrooms. All very nice, but what about the missing wallpaper in the living room?
There are many ways in which the existing platform could be improved in areas such as build/deployment (too manual+resource intensive), or workflow tools (pales in comparison to Siebel). Since the introduction of Chatter, I think Salesforce have lost the plot a bit, and are focussing too much on whizz-bang new features to grab the attention of CIOs who are moon-walking to the tune of the social enterprise.
Anyway, enough metaphor. Let me get some quantitative proof by rifling through the Summer 12 upgrade release notes. Here is a summary of what is to be delivered, categorised as 'Replace the broken fridge' (useful) or 'Install kitchen disco mirrorball' (less useful). Ok, maybe not quite enough metaphor...
Chatter Messenger: Kitchen Mirrorball
Just get Google Apps - as a collaborative platform it trumps Salesforce.
Additional Chatter Enhancements: Kitchen Mirrorball
Chatter, chatter, chatter. Too much focus on this nice but certainly non-essential activity feed feature. Get me some decent way of creating a fully automated release build of an environment without any manual steps instead please.
Sales Cloud Enhancements - New Fridge
The bread and butter. No qualms here.
Case Feed Enhancements - Kitchen Mirrorball with added smoke machine
Unsure about Case Feed. Again, branching into new territory when the standard Service Cloud could really do with some better routing/queue functionality to bring it closer to Oracle's RightNow in that respect
Service Cloud Enhancements - New Fridge
A bit more bread and butter, but minimal
Salesforce Knowledge Enhancements - Kitchen Mirrorball
Who knows of a client that has the Knowledge module? Why this isn't free is beyond me.
Live Agent Enhancements - Kitchen Mirrorball
Nice but niche
Analytics Enhancements - New Fridge
Now it is going to tell you when it times out which is good. But seriously, some improvements to cross filters etc - I really like what they are doing here and all credit for going back on the initial charging model
Data.com - Kitchen Mirrorball
Lots and lots about this in the release notes. But the use of this is still fairly niche.
Schema builder - Kitchen Mirrorball
Noddy.
Site.com enhancements - New Fridge
I think this has potential, but ultimately any enterprise that wants to build out web facing apps are going to use Heroku. If they really beefed up this offering and made it scalable it could be very useful (abstraction layer on top of Heroku for instance?)
Force.com: Flow / VisualForce / Apex - New Fridge
Unfortunately improvements to the core platform in these areas tend to be quite minimal, but having said that they are certainly welcome. Flow has the potential to be useful if they bolster it a bit to be more of a behind the scenes workflow engine rather than a scripting tool. VisualForce and Apex are incredibly core to the platform, and the increases in limits and improvement developer tools in Summer 12 are welcome.
So I guess I would sum up the Summer 12 release as follows:
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