Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce 2014 Event

Taking a page from the VMware Inc. book of earlier-than-expected product reveals, Salesforce.com is rolling out a string of major updates in advance of its Dreamforce ’14 summit next week that provide an early taste of what is shaping up as a historic conference. The cloud juggernaut is also taking the opportunity to reinforce its aggressive focus on connected devices, a drive that the launch couldn’t reflect more clearly.

Closing deals the mobile-first way

To start off, the Oracle Corp. rival has aligned the branding of its flagship customer relationship management (CRM) platform with Salesforce1, an environment for building and hosting platform-independent applications introduced at last year’s conference. In addition to the new name, Sales Cloud1 also sports a slew of features that were not available in the original edition, most notably a mobile service called Today pegged as the salesperson’s equivalent of Google Now.

The app provides a personalized view of customer details, news, weather updates and practically every other imaginable tidbit of information that a user might need before entering a client meeting. Complementing Today is a collection of note-taking, scheduling and to-do applications that are remarkably similar to the lineup that Oracle unveiled at its own customer conference last week, plus two specialized clients for mapping out deal stages and identifying teammates that can help close a sale.

Also new with Sales Cloud1 is mobile access to data about top accounts, contacts and industries from Thomson Reuters Corp.’s content marketplace, which Salesforce said has already proven a powerful tool in the hand of Wall Street professionals.

Connected support

Joining the cloud giant’s new mobile-first spin on CRM is Service Cloud1, a revamped version of its customer support platform that likewise sports a new name and extra features. Standing out from the bunch is the enhanced agent console, which automatically presents care representatives with resolutions to known issues, frequently accessed resources and other filtered content.

Even more significant is the addition of what Salesforce calls Instant Service Communities, a tool that allows users to create miniature social networks around specific brands and topics. That functionality can be useful in scenarios that aren’t always obvious. For example, a mobile manufacturer might choose to set up a community dedicated to an upcoming device if it sees sufficient customer interest leading up to the launch.

Service Cloud1 and Sales Cloud1 are both available immediately, but most of the new features announced for the latter platform will only hit the general market next year.