Experience with salesforce.com?

[gboyce at badbelly.com (gboyce)]

On Mon, 12 Dec 2005, John Abreau wrote:

> My company is looking to standardize our calendar and contact tools across 
> our US and European offices, and someone proposed using a web portal at 
> salesforce.com. I've been looking it over, and I don't see any support for 
> vCalendar or vCard imports or exports. It seems to only support something 
> called IntelliSync, and then only a customized version that is limited to 
> PalmOS and Outlook.
>
> I'm looking for something that will work with webcal urls, so it will 
> interoperate at least with Mozilla Sunbird and phpcalendar. Has anyone used 
> salesforce.com and can relate their experiences withit?

Anytime you're thinking about entrusting your data to a third party 
vendor, it is always a good idea to assess their security.  They have a 
website where they talk about the security of their service in some 
interesting terms:

http://www.salesforce.com/products/security.jsp

"Internal Systems Security: Inside of the perimeter firewalls, the systems 
are safeguarded by network address translation, port redirection, IP 
masquerading, non-routable IP addressing schemes, and more. The specific 
details of these features are proprietary."

Lets break this down, shall we?

Network Address Translation = NAT
Port Redirection = Could be a number of things.. including NAT
IP Masquerading = Another name for NAT
Non-Routable IP Addressing Schemes = usually used in conjunction with NAT.

Bah.  Maybe I just have trouble trusting third party hosting when I don't 
need to.

--
Greg