Hoping to capture more seats in the enterprise, Salesforce.com will introduce Salesforce Sandbox as part of its Winter 2006 release. Sandbox is a full parallel copy of a company's production environment to be used for testing, development, and end-user training.Sandbox becomes a contained and safe environment where IT departments can test integration with back-office applications and customizations as well as train employees on a new piece of functionality without having an impact on live data, according to George Hu, vice president and general manager of applications at Salesforce.com.

Benefits:

• Test new customizations or features before rolling out to users
  


• Create a development environment for building and testing integration
  


• Create a safe training environment for employees
  

In addition to the short-term operational goal of giving IT a familiar mirror image of its production environment, Sandbox also becomes a strategic component in Salesforce.com's long-term effort to extend its reach beyond CRM.Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com's CEO, has often said that his objective is for Salesforce to become the SaaS platform for third-party service providers. To that end, AppExchange was introduced earlier this year. It includes pre-built applications created by Salesforce.com and its partners. The stated goal of AppExchange, according to Salesforce.com officials, is to extend SaaS beyond CRM to finance, IT, human resources, legal, R&D, and other business software segments. Sandbox will allow companies to download these applications and test them with their own data before going live.

Source: 1, 2Prashanth RaiTag(s):SaaS, CRM