The recent VMforce announcement makes sense for salesforce.com and is an interesting proposition. It was only a matter of time…

It ‘opens up’ the Force.com platform to 6m Java developers and positions it as an open, mainstream PaaS competitor (head-to-head with Azure, Amazon and others…). Here at FinancialForce.com, we are already looking at how we can deliver  our enterprise accounting functionality to Java developers through VMforce. We have lots of ideas already including packaged web services to help developers build our functionality into their apps to significantly simplify configuration and set up. More on that later.

VMforce provides a much needed opportunity to Java developers. It’s early days, but we will wait expectantly to see the innovation that comes out of this.

The FinancialForce.com design team are working hard to take advantage of some of the new features in Salesforce.com’s Spring ’10 release of the Force.com platform. Our own Spring ’10 release is due out in April. Below is one small example of how we are making best use of some of the new features. More to come…

FinancialForce.com Email Templates

Salesforce.com’s Spring ’10 platform release brings with it a new feature calledGlobal Email Templates. Using this feature Salesforce.com provides the email template author the means to tailor the labels and layout according to a specific language. This is a great example of platform enhancement that immediately benefits existing FinancialForce.com application users. Customers of FinancialForce Accounting can make the most of email templates for sending invoices, reminder letters and remittance advice.