My company is considering moving to Salesforce (running away from NetSuite). Having been burned before with sales guy's promises, I would love to find out from the user community the experience (at least from the IT point of view) as it pertains to the following:

1. Web Services:
a. How robust are they? Many glitches? Speed (esp. during business hours)?

b. Are there any known limitations. E.g., can Web Services read and write all custom fields and custom tables? Any large sections of functionality that aren't exposed by the API? (I've seen in other posts that the definition of custom fields cannot currently be done, but I assume that once defined you can query/add/update those custom fields on records?)

c. Is it plausible to have a custom application that does, say, ten SOAP messages per minute to the Salesforce web service? Are there licensing issues with number of records/requests/kilobytes per day/user/whatever and if so is it difficult to make an integration with a custom app work within those restrictions?

2. Quote/Configuration Add-ons:
a. We know that Salesforce currently doesn't have a quoting capability. We looked at several options, such as QuoteASP (pricey at $55 per month per user, and limited configuration possibilities), but are wondering if this is the best one that integrates with Salesforce, and if there are any open source or other options?

b. Our requirements for quote/configuration are these: we only sell basically one item, but it has 3 parameters, each from a finite list. The unit price of the item is a function of all 3 parameters (it is not obtained by adding factors associated with each parameter separately), so it can be only determined by a table lookup.

3. Support:
a. How knowledgeable is their support team from the perspective of an IT guy on the client side who is responsible for implementation/administration?


Thanks a lot for any specific answers or general advice or other war stories.


Steve