5 New Tools for Salesforce.com Released This Week: Virtual Private SaaS, Cloud Billing and More

Dreamforce, Salesforce.com‘s annual user conference, is next week and the related announcements are starting to roll in. This week we’re seeing an upgrade to Zuora‘s cloud billing system, a new “virtual private SaaS” product for Salesforce.com and three new Force.com Labs apps. All these new tools are now available in AppExchange. Let’s take a look.

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Navajo Systems: Salesforce.com as a Virtual Private SaaS

Navajo Systems launched its “virtual private SaaS” for Salesforce.com this week. No, it’s not an on-premise instance of Salesforce.com. Instead, it encrypts all the sensitive data you put into Salesforce.com so that even if someone accesses your Salesforce.com account, they won’t be able to actually access any of your data. The company also offers similar services for Google Apps, Oracle‘s CRM On Demand, and other services.

Zuora Updates Its Cloud Billing Product for Salesforce.com

Web-based billing company Zuora released the new version of its Force.com application today: Z-Force 4.0. Here’s what’s new, according to the company’s announcement:

• Pricing and packaging for subscription and usage-based products and services
• Quotes and orders that have multiple products and recurring variables
• Subscription changes such as upgrades, downgrades, and add-on subscriptions (e.g. add 10 seats to an existing subscription)
• Manage renewals, the lifeblood of subscription businesses
• A single source of subscription business metrics like monthly recurring revenue

Chatter RSS

Chatter RSS is a new feature just graduated out of Force.com labs that allows Chatter users to subscribe to any RSS or Atom feed within Chatter. Essentially, it lets users use Chatter as a feed reader.

SurveyForce

SurveyForce does just what you might think it does: enables you to creates surveys, send out them out by e-mail, and track the results within your Salesforce.com dashboard. This will compete with several existing survey products already available in AppExchange, but oddly SurveyMonkey has never created an AppExchange app.

Milestones

The last of the new Force.com Labs applications is Milestones, a simple project management tool. It’s not clear that this will offer enough sophistication to make it worth while, but it could come in handy for Salesforce.com-based collaboration.

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