The best CRM available

The switching costs are too high.

No idea - before my time at this company.

I do recommend you go broad on the number of users as will help drive adoption.

You can pay $3k for in classroom training – it is possible to get discounts

It costa $1k to attend dreamforce where they have pretty good training

Online training is free and are good resources – self guided, high quality, good for novice to intermediate users

I haven’t had great experiences with calling customer support.

The Salesforce user community is however pretty good. You can find answers to what you are looking for. I can find the answer on the general web via a Google search and by looking in the actual Salesforce.com customer community. I generally just search the Web.

There are some inconsistencies between different objects.

The reporting engine is weak, you still have to export data to process in Excel. We use demand tools for marketing analytics on top and use SQLServer for trend analysis.

Release strategy/feature set in different areas is not consistent. For example, the work flow for accounts is good but the workflow for forecasting has not been released yet. Their product development strategy is a balance between where they want to do market development/ innovation and where customers are pushing them to catch-up. Their large global 20 customers push them in a lot of the catch-up areas. The catch-up features are generally good but not great. One example is reporting functionality which allows you to do joins between tables. Opportunity quoting is another area where they caught up. It was developed as an afterthought and it doesn’t compare to Siebel.

Very good – almost 100%. With their latest release mechanism, really no downtime.