My proposed talk, Plone + Salesforce.com: Best of breed applications working in harmony for your organization, was accepted for the 2007 Plone Conference in Italy. I'm really excited to connect with everyone that's there (has it really been almost a year since Seattle 2006) and talk on a subject I personally find very gratifying and strategic to the Plone ecosystem.

If you're curious or have ideas about what would be good to cover, my proposed and working talk excerpt is:

Plone + Salesforce.com: Best of breed applications working in harmony for your organization

We all know and love what Plone accomplishes in the content management space, but ambitious tasks of customer and constituent relationship management (CRM) often fall outside the scope of the content management problem domain. Yet the latter is an equally critical need for organizations. Salesforce.com is a well known and established leader for customer and constituent relationship and with it's innovative API-first design, over 50% of all traffic comes via its SOAP API. This makes it an obvious candidate for integration with Plone and there are tools (Beatbox, Salesforce Base Connector, Salesforce PFG Adapter, and Salesforce Auth Plugin) to do just that.

This talk will introduce the use cases where Plone can benefit from CRM integration, Salesforce.com's ability to model an organization's business processes, and how, where and why they can and do compliment each other. This has everything to do with choosing the best of breed CRM and CMS and using them together to transform your organization. Why build it from scratch, when you can integrate it with Plone?

The only part I'm dreading about the conference -- making all the tough choices about what talks to attend. Congratulations to the organizers for such an impressive talk list.  There's not one talk I wouldn't want to attend.