This is very much a Beta feature right now, but i-Dialogue now provides an Outbound Message listener for synchronizing Salesforce objects in near real-time.

Outbound Messaging (OM) is an advanced feature and there is potential for circular messaging to occur when this feature is not configured correctly, but following the Wiki article should get most Admins going in the right direction.

The use of outbound messaging vs. periodic ETL polling typically spawns a debate over "real-time vs right-time" integration.

For most organizations, it is often acceptable that a press release, job posting, or new property listing appear on a website within 20-30 minutes of publishing. However, in our 2+ years experience with Salesforce and mid-market B2B customers I have fielded many requests for real-time integration.

Even though Salesforce does not have a formal SLA, the reliability of the web service API lately has allowed us to address many real-time requirements through the use of a "query and cache" design pattern. But there is a noticeable latency for transactional web pages that depend on this design, so we've developed a hybrid approach that involves real-time filter queries that return pre-fetched records as the ideal solution.

Outbound messaging ensures frequently accessed objects are always up to date and are kept synchronized in the background.

Here it is July and I feel like a kid on Christmas knowing that the next release of SmarterStats includes advanced charts and graphs using Silverlight. Very cool!

SmarterStats is one of many applications included with every i-Dialogue subscription.

I found it interesting that Entellium, a CRM software company, is abandoning its browser based CRM application in favor of it's rich client CRM application.

This is one of several recent events that signals (to me) that a larger "Software + Services" (S+S) inflection point is now underway.

Looking at Gen Y office workers as a leading indicator, I'm often amazed at how many actually *prefer* to use rich Windows applications. The browser is just an alternative interface, much like a mobile phone.

eMarketing is a never ending battle and compromise between "reach" vs "rich", with maximum "reach" and lowest common denominator channels winning out, so I don't see this trend significantly impacting the custom interaction front lines. A website and simple HTML emails will always be guaranteed to reach a wide audience.

But I think productivity and development tools will most certainly be revived in a S+S context. Even Salesforce.com, known primarily as a web-based application, has converted me to their S+S development model of using Eclipse (a rich Windows application) to communicate with Salesforce via webservices, and I would expect the deployment of an Adobe Air-based Salesforce application to be announced in the near future to keep them relevant with this trend.

"Multi-client" may become the new buzzword that replaces "multi-tenant" in SaaS circles.

The "Milestones" feature in i-Dialogue CMS can really save your bacon if you ever need to rollback a particular web page to a previous version.

Here's a quick walk-through of this feature (click the "Play" button below to view).

What is the future of search engine optimization (SEO) now that consumers and customers can interact with Google like this (click play below)?

Yet another semi-scripted, one-take tutorial on how to use the Dialogue Script PageLayout control to create a simple online survey that is managed in Salesforce.

View the full screen video.

It's been over a year since I took a hard look at offering a hosted i-Dialogue solution for Microsoft CRM. At the time, the Microsoft CRM partner subscription model really wasn't in place (to be fair, the Salesforce Royalty Winter gave partners shivers too ).

But a lot has changed in a year:

• Microsoft launched CRM Online
• Microsoft reached out and gave us a great deal on a MSDN subscription
• Microsoft launched the Service Providers License Program
• The CRM 4.0 API offers a dramatic improvement over previous releases

I continue to be astonished at how many of our Salesforce customers use Microsoft Outlook, and I really see no end in sight for the Exchange beast, so it's worth conceding on this front that any truly effective eMarketing or Sales "dialogue" must integrate well with Outlook... somehow.

More on this later...

Cost of gas getting you down? Virtualize your office with on-demand applications and work from anywhere, with anyone, at anytime.

We've added a few more 'must have' apps to our list of SaaS productivity tools.

www.whenisgood.net - Excellent for coordinating product demos, installations, and meetings.
www.echosign.com - For digital signatures, closing contracts and agreements, signing NDAs.
www.centraldesktop.com - Project and issue management.

All 3 offerings provide great value with their introductory free versions. The paid subscriptions are worthwhile and have immediate ROI at every tier.