Salesforce Mobile on iPhone – NOT!

16 Jul 2008

Just a quick update. Yes I admit it, I do road-test the competition and especially when it is in areas that we have software development being considered, and in this case I took a look at the NEW iPhone Salesforce.com Mobile add-on.

I was good, I went to the mobile store and downloaded the current version and this installed OK, I then went to Salesforce.com and signed up to a 30 day trial, so that I could see what this new iPhone add-on was going to give me. I activated the account and was ready to go.

I tried to login the FREE iPhone add-on and found out that I actually need to

have an account that is mobile enabled with Mobile Licenses, so I guess that’s not FREE then! That’s OK, I have access to an account where I can login and trial the add-on, only to find that it did not recognise the user as being mobile enabled. So, I got that fixed, realising that you actually need to have the Professional or above Salesforce.com account to be able to get this functionality (shame for all of those mid market companies, but I guess that’s why they deal with OpenCRM – sorry slipped into the sales pitch by accident :D)

Eventually tested the application and felt really disappointed, you see, we always benchmark ourselves with Salesforce.com, yes I know they are much bigger than us (at the moment), but they do ‘carve out’ some really good ideas, but on this occasion, you just don’t get enough information. The application is just too lite.

Also, on the test systems that the Salesforce.com guys use, there must only be 100 Companies (Accounts) with linked Contacts, but on my system I have 10K Companies with multiple linked Contacts, so I guess I am going to need to the next generation iPhone that has an increase from 16GB to 100GB, just to help me store all of my stuff.

It’s a good idea, but why not just browse live and save yourself the problems associated with this cut down version? Well, I tried this as well, and now I know why! That does not work very well on a mobile device, just getting logged in was a trial. I could not get a stable connection to the trial account, kept dropping out with Safari complaining about pages and rendering of pages ‘squiffy’.

Sales Picth : So I guess that made me feel better, viewing OpenCRM live on my iPhone is the way to go. But we are looking at how we can push some of the data, more inteligently onto your mobile device, for when you are disconnected.