Salesforce.com recently announced AppSpace, an extension to Salesforce CRM that allows Salesforce users to collaborate with customers through a Salesforce hosted portal. It appears to be the existing Customer Self-Service portal, but with some additional features.

AppSpace exposes a powerful feature that we've been exploiting for awhile, which is the ability to publish custom objects through the web.

AppSpace is probably comparable to a small subset of features found in i-Dialogue (namely the My Account page) and I'm sure many Enterprise and Ultimate Edition customers will take SForce up on the $995 per month offer. Once our certification is complete, we should be able to provide similar functionality to Professional Edition customers at an SMB rate.

I was a little disappointed that the base offering is limited to 200 users, which limits its ability to be a distribution platform for our Lead centric applications, such as Event Management, or HR job posting/application modules. Also, I'm not making the MySpace connection. Isn't MySpace a place where people create their own pages and personalize them for the anonymous community to consume and reference (aka social networking)? Or am I just showing my ignorance of MySpace? I have to admit I'm not too hip on this.

What will the actual domain name (URL) be for these App Spaces? Can customers create a sub-domain, such as portal.domain.com that refers to their Salesforce hosted portal? Or will it be a Salesforce.com URL? The ability to customize the colors for header, body, and footer may be a limitation for many Marketing departments seeking to offer an integrated, fully branded web experience using their own domain name.

I'm guessing the Discussion Forums functionality are being provided by Jive Software (another local Portland software company), which isn't a bad deal considering their forum server alone starts around $10K (which maybe explains the $995 per 200 customer seat license model?).

Finally, the "End of the Portal" touch by SF Marketing in the press release seemed a little over the top. I think the real value and long-term potential of AppSpace was largely buried in the PR.

I would of course be remiss not to point out that a $995 per month budget on i-Dialogue would get you "the works" for unlimited Leads and Contacts; including Content Management, Email Marketing, Forums, Knowledge Base, 3-5 live support licenses; all on a 99.99% uptime dedicated virtual server. But I digress... Salesforce customers are an intelligent bunch that will ultimately figure out the right solutions to their problems.