It has been a while since my last post. The last few weeks have been really crazy both at home and at work so I have a good excuse.

Last week I was in Atlanta for some training on some new software for work. The software is Customer Relationship Management, a.k.a. CRM. Nowadays keeping track of customers and their history in a company is next to impossible without some good software lending a hand. That's where Salesforce.com's software comes in.

About a month or two after I started my job I was asked to start looking at different CRM Solutions for the company. Since I had been hired on to be the Web Administrator they figured that I would know a good CRM "web app" if I saw one.

I started my testing in the opensource world with Sugar CRM Community Edition. While I was generally impressed with the overall functionality there was a lot about Sugar that didn't quite work like it should. Overally it had a lot of functionality, but didn't work in our situation. We looked at a few others and they were either way too expesive, or else just not as impressive as we would have liked. That's when Salesforce came into the picture.

I've used a lot of different software online, and every once in a while I will come across one that "wows" me. Most of those apps are Google owned and it's been a while since I have found one that I really got into. When we found Salesforce I was immediately sold due to the huge range of functionality and customer base. Salesforce can do a lot more than your regular CRM, and the most impressive thing is that it is a "software as a service" piece so it is hosted off-site. The the other advantage to having it off-site is that they are always adding new, cool features. I was reading through their new features for June and I am really impressed.

The training went really well, and we are all very excited to start implementing it. The biggest challenges are going to be determining our business processes and then converting them into creating an awesome app in Salesforce to keep it all in check. The other challenge is going to be the data integration with our Student Information System. At the of the training I think the three of us fell in love with the Salesforce software, and the company as a whole. The software is absolutely amazing–no wonder they are the leaders in CRM software.