Dreamforce 2011 Wrap up: Our 10 Favorite Blogs about #DF11

Balakrishna Narasimhan

Last week, we were at Dreamforce with about 40,000 other cloud believers (and maybe a few skeptics). As usual, there were a number of exciting product and platform announcements ranging from data.com which brings together social profile information with structured D&B data, to the first social manufacturing application, to the integration of Infor and Workday with Force.com. But what made this year’s event notable was the way Salesforce is unifying their diverse platforms and products around the idea of enabling the social enterprise.

Salesforce defines a social enterprise as one that collaborates, sells and operates socially, that engages and markets to its customers on public social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, and makes its own products and applications social. Salesforce has been moving in this direction since the launch of Chatter in 2009, but it’s only now that the vision has become fully realized. They’re poised to become the platform to address a range of emerging business challenges that traditional software doesn’t even acknowledge let alone address.

As we looked back over the week and read through all the excellent commentary that’s been written about Dreamforce, we wanted to highlight our main takeaways from the week through articles that we enjoyed reading. So without further ado, here are our top 10 #DF11 blog posts.

Salesforce has moved far beyond CRM
1) Has Salesforce.com graduated to the IT big leagues? (InformationWeek)
2) Accelerating your business with the cloud: Conversations with Facebook and NetApp (Appirio blog)
3) Salesforce not only matures but has plans for enterprise domination (CloudAve)

Salesforce’s platform enables an entirely new class of social business apps
4) The promise and challenges of Benioff’s social enterprise vision (ZDNet)
5) The social enterprise: What is it? Does it matter to enterprises? (Appirio blog)
6) Salesforce gunning for manufacture ERP (ZDNet)

Chatter has gone from a feature to the main interface for enterprise data across apps
7) Collaboration hardwired into context (Enterprise Irregulars)
8) Salesforce.com, Workday forge Chatter alliance: Win-win for both (ZDNet)
9) Platform for the social enterprise: Salesforce and Workday (Appirio blog)

And finally, if you want to just relive the experience of being at Dreamforce and see the impact of a social world, we loved this very creative look at the event through social media.