Salesforce.com (News - Alert) today announced that Canon Marketing Japan has deployed Salesforce.com’s mobile product to 1,100 users.

 

The Canon (News - Alert) Group’s subscribers throughout Japan can confirm or update opportunities and sales activities in their spare time from virtually anywhere without logging on to their laptops, company officials say, adding that Canon sees the number of mobile users growing as the company expands its Salesforce subscriber base to 4,000 by the end of the year.

 

Canon MJ had been using disparate SFA systems on a departmental basis since 2005. The company decided to consolidate its systems in October 2007. Canon MJ integrated 22 different systems using Force.com Platform-as-a-Service. The company went live with its integrated Salesforce system in February 2008.

 

“We don’t carry around laptops anymore,” said Hiroaki Sasaki, director of business products administration at Canon Marketing Japan Business Products Company. “We can do most of our work on a single handset anytime, anywhere.”

 

Earlier this month, Salesforce.com previewed Salesforce Summer ‘08 at Dreamforce Europe in London.

 

The vendor’s 26th generation release, “Salesforce Summer ’08,” has new features for Salesforce Content and Salesforce Ideas, along with new CRM features in sales, marketing, customer service and partner management.

 

Company officials say the new generation makes more use of consumer Web technologies such as tagging, subscriptions and recommendations.

 

For Salesforce Content there’ll be delivery to all 15 languages that Salesforce.com supports. Users will also be able to collaborate in Salesforce Content with their partners and customers in the Salesforce Partner Portal and Salesforce Customer Portal.

 

A new “Content Analytics” feature offers metrics to “determine the most frequently used content among sales reps, marketers and other users,” company officials say.

 

What Salesforce officials call “the second pillar in Salesforce.com’s collaboration applications” is Salesforce Ideas, an app letting customer, partner or employee communities post, discuss, and vote on ideas. There will be a feature called “Multiple Communities,” which lets companies create multiple communities “in order to better organize and segment the ideas coming from different groups, and provides participants with a forum to engage with the specific communities that most apply to them.”