Producing documents has in the past been the slowest part of the sales process. Collecting information and putting it into quotes and proposals can take up a lot of sales staff time that could be better used in other tasks.

California-based PandaDoc is announcing its software's integration with Salesforce to make sales proposal and quote generation faster and more personalized.

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A warning has gone out to customers of Salesforce.com that the Dyreza trojan, previously targeted at banking sites, may be a risk to users of the CRM solution.

The malware uses social engineering techniques to get the victim to infect the system via email. Once installed it uses "browser hooking" to allow Dyreza to intercept content entered by the user into the web browser before that content is transmitted over the network to a web site. Critically this allows the interception to occur before the data is encrypted.

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We reported towards the end of last year that cloud backup specialist Spanning had expanded its portfolio of software to cover Salesforce.

It's now taken things a step further by launching a mobile app for Salesforce admins to allow them to monitor and control their backups from anywhere.

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Cloud-based business planning specialist Anaplan has launched a new territory planning and quota management tool on the Salesforce1 App Exchange.

Anaplan provides real-time analytics, allowing sales managers to adjust their planning to produce better results.

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If something is already stored in the cloud you might wonder why you'd need to make an additional backup. Extra security is one reason, or the need to make backups more frequently.

Salesforce.com's backups take a daily snapshot of customer data but don’t provide for rapid and cost effective recovery. It is possible to export all your data each week but this is a manual process and prone to errors.

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CRM data is the life blood of any sales-based business so it's important to look after it. That's doubly true if you're contemplating moving your CRM activity to the cloud. In order to address this, Texas-based backup and recovery specialist Spanning Cloud Apps is expanding its product range to cover the most popular cloud CRM package Salesforce.com.

Unlike other solutions Spanning Backup for Salesforce is embedded within the main Salesforce user interface. This means that backup and recovery options can be reviewed without leaving the package and key activities shared directly to Chatter feeds.

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Dropbox, one of the leading services for cloud storage, has been making recent inroads to become business and IT-friendly. The company boasts that its business user-base has doubled since 2012, and now reaches over four million customers. To keep that fire stoked, Dropbox now announces a new partnership with Salesforce.

"Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re partnering with Salesforce to bring great technology to the enterprise and help users connect with customers in a whole new way", says the company's Ari Friedland.

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Knowledge management specialist Bloomfire, whose product we looked at a few weeks ago, has announced deeper integration with the Salesforce customer relationship management platform. This will allow users to share information and knowledge with their co-workers without having to leave the Salesforce screen.

Bloomfire began integrating with Salesforce in 2012 when it joined the AppExchange to allow single sign-ons and posts from Bloomfire to appear on the Salseforce Chatter page. The deeper integration will allow sales professionals access to the information they need to close deals, enable them to get questions answered quickly, and share the feedback they receive. From the company's point of view information gathered in Salesforce can be shared without giving all employees access to the package, plus knowledge gained from Salesforce can be used across the organization.

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Maybe it wasn't drool-worthy enough for heaps of fanboys to liveblog, but Leading Cloud CRM provider Salesforce has already rolled out a host of big news at its week-long Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. Some of the news has been in the form of new product unveilings and new partnerships that focus primarily upon expanding Salesforce's social CRM functionality, and growing its business into newer, less-trodden territory.

Some of the news has taken the form of progress updates on Salesforce as a company, and on the state of enterprise cloud business as a whole. Those who are acutely aware of bubble-like investment opportunities where growth is fast but returns on investment are uncertain will want to take note.

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Back in November, we took a quick look at the Tout "e-mail as a service" platform for small businesses and individuals.

The startup provides a web-based email analytics platform that lets users track the status of their messages from any email provider in real time, to see whether they were viewed and clicked through, so they can be effectively tailored for optimum engagement.

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Salesforce, the gold standard of cloud-based CRM, launched on Tuesday a new customer support application called Desk.com, which gives small and medium-sized businesses a "social help desk" designed so ultraconnected, smartphone-toting employees can appropriately connect with the ultraconnected, smartphone-toting customer.

Desk.com grew out of Salesforce's 50 million dollar acquisition of Assistly just five months ago. The Assistly application was notable because it took customer relationships on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter and then integrated them with "traditional" support channels such as e-mail and telephone, making social network relationships among the most important methods of communication for companies.

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VMware on Tuesday unveiled Horizon App Manager, an IT solution for provisioning and managing public and private cloud-based services.

At TechEd 2011 in Atlanta, Microsoft put a great deal of emphasis on the accelerating adoption of cloud-based SaaS solutions among corporations who want the ability to deliver and run applications on the widest array of hardware possible. VMware's Horizon App Manager looks to tackle the control, visibility, and compliance aspect of these services.

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Microsoft announced the worldwide availability of its Dynamics CRM Online on Monday. The software is the cloud-based version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, and will be released globally both in on-premises and partner-hosted versions on February 28.

Dynamics CRM Online first launched in 2008 (after shedding its original "Live" moniker) to compete in the burgeoning business of cloud-based Customer Relationship Management software where Salesforce and Oracle also sought to establish dominance.

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The patent infringement cases between Microsoft and Salesforce in both the U.S. District Courts of the Western District of Washington and in Delaware have been settled, Microsoft announced today.

Last May, Microsoft sued CRM software company Salesforce for nine counts of patent infringement, and Salesforce followed with its own countersuit a month later, saying Microsoft's .NET platform and SharePoint products violated five Salesforce patents.

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Last month, Microsoft sued Customer relationship management (CRM) software company Salesforce for nine counts of patent infringement in the District Court in the Western District of Washington.

The complaint appeared to be a defensive maneuver after Salesforce purchased cloud data management provider Jigsaw, a company in which Microsoft had important interests.

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