I have been learning about Salesforce more recently watching many videos about administration and signing up for a Salesforce account. It is a remarkable tool.
What I like about it is that it has the functionality of Office365 in an easier-to-deal-with package. For example, Office uses Teams to do video and communicate with colleagues, but Salesforce has Chatter and does video calling as well. It nicely attaches the data to a record, and to me, that is a superior and more easily understood way of working.
The problem with Microsoft products is that often the piece of information you need is in another product. So you have Teams, Word, Sharepoint, and others open when with Salesforce you only need one open. It has a superior tab interface that I think people would rather use once they learn how to use it.
It is also quite remarkable how similar it is to Office 365 functionality. It has roles, permissions, and so on that any Office 365 person could easily learn. It can connect with other solutions and if I were a sales organization I would move to it immediately.
One of the arguments for Windows is that most people know how to use Windows products like Word and Outlook. The problem is that even though they know how to use it, it isn’t an efficient way to work. There is so much window management and copying and pasting information. Copilot is supposed to reduce this but it also requires people to be trained on it and to not feel threatened by it. I think that AI is threatening people’s job stability, so they are going to push back against using it and/or not use it properly on purpose.
Is there a downside to Salesforce? Not that I can see. I love relational databases and I loved the interface that people who have used things like Monday.com/Asana.com or other cloud-based information management would understand. The future is databases and we have avoided databases but their time is past due. People need to be more sophisticated in how they deal with information, and not try to recreate the wheel with Office365.