I met with Steve Anderson from ONE Northwest in the morning to prepare for our presentation in the session "Portals and Web Sites Powered By AppExchange". The goal of the presentation was to demonstrate integration between a couple open source CMS solutions and Salesforce.com.

Steve utilizes Plone to develop various web sites for non-profits (and turns out to be a masterful S-Control developer as well).

My presentation started with a blank slate web site and incrementally added "Contact Us", "Support", and "Careers" pages that integrated directly with Salesforce; all within about 15 minutes.

About 50%-60% of the audience, by a show of hands, were already using .NET with Salesforce. At least 50% had already incorporated Web-to-Lead into their web site.

The "Careers" portion of the demo went smoothly as we successfully displayed open job positions in a web page from the Recruitment AppExchange app and captured online job applications that immediately appeared in Salesforce.

Finally, I spent the afternoon attending the Partner Summit. Having read all of Geoffrey Moore's books on product management and marketing, I was interested in attending a panel discussion that grouped him with some other silicon valley venture capitalists.

There was some good discussion around the on-demand business model and, more specifically, how to capitalize start-ups working from the AppExchange (or more directly, should start-ups even seek equity financing since the entry costs are so low).

The Salesforce Channel/Partner management representatives did a great job identifying application areas that they deemed strategic and would therefore invest in internally; and also highlighted where they saw continued dependence on partners to fill the SFA/CRM/PRM gaps going forward.