Marc Benioff is talking about Salesforce.com. I’ll skip transcription of why Salesforce is so great, blah blah blah.
“We used to get releases every four years at Oracle; we’ve had 25 major releases in 8 years at Salesforce.”
After a long presentation on why Salesforce.com is so great, the SVP of Platform has taken the stage to talk about technology stuff.
We’re now looking at a custom application called “Cinema Management” written by Dolby to manage aspects of theatre management. Dolby wanted to do something custom for the UI, so they built a custom UI on top of Salesforce’s APIs.
So far, the new application seems to have nothing whatsoever to do with Flash. The graphs they’re showing are generated by Google’s Chart API. Ah, wait, they use an embedded Flash movie player.
Ah… now they’ve launched an off-line version of the custom Dolby application that works off-line with AIR. It uses SQLite to store all data off-line. Once you connect back on-line, it automatically synchronizes with the server (there’s no sync UI, it just magically happens).
Wow, that’s pretty cool.
We’re now doing a Q&A with Kevin Lynch and Marc Benioff.
Q: Do businesses care about the quality of UX in enterprise internal apps?
A: Consumers are growing to expect rich experiences, so they are demanding it of CIOs. The question is not if they should care, it’s about how quickly they can do it. We want to enable rapid creation of applications with compelling user interfaces.
Q: Do you see any metrics about how to measure the improvement of productivity [associated with high-quality UIs]?
A: Adoption. CIOs have been dealing with lack of adoption, so we give you tools to monitor usage to determine if users are actually adopting the application. We check to see what people are actually using. Users can also rate the applications.
Ben Galbraith 
Hello,
I would like to gauge the interest level of a new solution developed by my company (Envisiontel) that is called Enlighten.
The Enlighten Customer Training Center was designed to help customers create, deploy and manage learning content designed for customer implementation and training. Whether you offer training for free or charge for it, our solution provides all the tools necessary to effectively manage learner progress within your training framework. By integrating our solution with Salesforce.com, existing Salesforce.com customers can
recognize even stronger efficiencies by authenticating access to proprietary training materials against existing customer records in your CRM application. All student records such as grades, data access, completion records and time stamps are passed back to Salesforce.com for enterprise reporting and dashboard analysis.
In addition, we have a solution that fully integrates with the open source LMS… Moodle.
the customers I have contacted so far seem very interested in this solution and I am anxious to hear what you have to say. Please visit us at http://www.Envisiontel.com.
Cheers