On February 24, 2010 Mark Benioff, Saleforce’s CEO, published an article on TechCrunch that raised the question “why isn’t all enterprise software like Facebook?” With the April release of Salesforce Content Salesforce is quickly moving Salesforce in this direction, and adding Content to all editions of Salesforce at no additional cost.
Salesforce Content makes it easy for you to find the document you’re looking for and to share your documents with others. This sounds like it should be easy to do in any product designed to share and manage content, but products like Microsoft Sharepoint are known for being difficult to use and almost impossible to quickly find specific content.
With Content, Salesforce provides Google-like search capabilities so you can search for files based on a specific word directly in your web browser. Or you can find documents based on how they are tagged by others in your company. Tagging quickly shows you which categories of documents are most used in your organization.
A particularly powerful feature of Content is the ability to “subscribe” to a document. Once subscribed to a document you’re emailed automatically whenever this document is changed. How many times has a document you depended on been modified by someone and you didn’t know it? Or you couldn’t find the latest version? Content solves both of these problems.
Content tracks document versions by date and time. It makes it easy to see who is subscribing to documents and downloading documents. In doing this it also allows you to see which documents aren’t being used. This solves a common problem that occurs in many organizations of applying resources to content that no one uses or cares about.
Document collaboration is simple with Content by allowing comments to be associated with each document and having those comments be tracked by date and time. Associating comments directly to a document is dramatically more efficient than sending emails back and forth.
Because Content is part of Salesforce you can apply Salesforce CRM best practices to your documents:
- Associate documents with new business opportunities you’re working on.
- Share documents within and outside your company and create an automated approval process before a document can be shared externally.
- Create automated alerts when documents need to be modified or checked
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