In cased you missed the Chatter announcement or the mayor of San Francisco, salesforce.com has posted a YouTube channel of Dreamforce 2009 keynote speeches here.

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=B6D4F85D2C8C039A

Here is a summary of the Dreamforce Keynote on Wednesday 11/18.  Marc Benioff confirmed that almost 19,000 people from 60 countries have registered for Dreamforce making this by far the largest in history.  That says tons about the growth of Cloud Computing and Salesforce.com.   Marc also brought SF Mayor Gavin Newsom onstage who provided a welcome to the city and spoke about SFDC Foundation efforts on environmental and homeless programs.  The bulk of the keynote was focused on the Real-time Cloud and new functionality.

Real-time Cloud

• Marc reviewed the multi-tenant architecture.  He introduced the new "5 minute" downtime capability that was enabled by new Oracle back-end functionality and the use of the SFDC East Coast data center as an active center versus its previous use only in a passive mode as a recovery center.  This is particularly interesting to us since Acumen and RCN were catalysts to pushing SFDC to build this capability in support of RCN's 24x7 B2C contact center.  RCN was the first SFDC customer to use this new capability and have been helping SFDC test and refine this new capability. 
• Marc introduced Service Cloud 2, Sales Cloud 2 and Custom Cloud 2.  He also mentioned a new cloud-based capability introduced as Chatter based on social computing in the cloud.

Service Cloud 2

Marc highlighted new capabilities on the CSS side (and how they integrate). SFDC provided a Service Cloud 2 demo of existing tools we've deployed to contact center clients plus this newer functionality that bolsters the solution.  These capabilities coupled with the "5 minute" downtime will really strengthen the SFDC solution for contact centers and I expect to see a good deal of momentum here as larger enterprises get even more comfortable with SFDC as a unified agent desktop and customer-facing service tool.

• Knowledge -  the port of Instranet to the cloud platform as SFDC Knowledge.  This is release 1 and provides basic functionality.  2010 will bring additional releases including a Knowledge API to migrate existing knowledge content and provide API access to content
• Agent Console 2 - new agent console built in Visualforce to improve the layout and usability of the UI
• Chatter - new social media tools including the existing Twitter and Facebook integration plus Salesforce Answers.  http://www.salesforce.com/chatter/ 

Sales Cloud 2

George Hu introduced Sales Cloud 2 and new features.   New features

• Quotes - this is one new feature that we are hearing interest in from our clients especially for business sales organizations.  Real-time quotes in .pdf based on a template can be created now right from an opportunity and other SFDC data.  The only catch here will be how this will work for customers that use external product catalogs.  Also, we expect integration of Quotes to contract management and e-signature solutions for an integrated process. 
• Content Library - new capability to handle video content and also the capability to access content via SFDC mobile.  There is also a content API which will help load existing content.  Even better is the announcement that Content is now free!  We will need to find out what storage constraints exist and how this will work for non-SFDC access to Content.
• Twitter - Social media integration for Tweat -to-Lead
• Cloud Scheduler - dubbed by SFDC as the "Evite" for sales meetings.  Multiple meetings times can be pitched and responded to via a webpage.  This will help the coordinate of business/sales meetings
• Analytics - new tools to modify reports and dashboards inline on the fly
• New Salesforce UI - a new look and feel that is coming next year leveraging web UI technology
  • Deal View - 4 boxes that provide key data on an opportunity at the top of the page
  • Links/hovers on the left side of the page with access to related lists.  This is user modifiable

Chatter

Marc introduced Chatter as a cloud-based social computing and collaboration platform.   The goal is to leverage the power of social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc) that we all use on the personal side of our lives and drive this same power into enterprises. He described Chatter as the evolution of workgroup computing.  The tagline is "join the conversation".  Parker Harris demo'ed Chatter

• Chatter provides profiles, status updates, groups, feeds, Twitter and Facebook integration, Google integration, Social Content/Apps and a Chatter API
• Feeds - see conversations and updates on your home page.  This also includes updates on SFDC data such as opportunities, cases, accounts, etc.  Chatter can also be isolated to a particular object and viewed on the object detail page.  External data feeds from other enterprise apps can be consumed as well
• Profiles - ability to define your profile.  This includes followers from within your business that subscribe to your profile.  There is also a people directory
• Groups - ability to define groups.  Groups could be formed around objects such as opportunities or just generally based on some common focus or thread
• Twitter - integration to Twitter for real-time feeds
• Ability to build your own collaboration applications

As predicted, Marc and SFDC had some announcements we knew in advance but also some surprises to share.   We will be learning more on these new cloud capabilities over the coming days.  Stay tuned for more...