Last year, Salesforce acquired Zoomin, a company specializing in organizing unstructured data such as documentation and knowledge base repositories. As part of that acquisition, they announced that there would be no further product features (other than bug fixes) added to the Zoomin platform and that it would reach the end of its life in 2027. Eventually, they will replace Zoomin with a yet-to-be-announced new product to be added to their Service Cloud and Agentforce services. The key word in that last sentence is “eventually,” which is why I say they are behaving badly.

This move puts Zoomin customers in a quandary, because Salesforce has asked these customers to decide on renewing their contracts within the next month. One reader, an IT manager at a large tech firm who has been a Zoomin customer, wrote to me, saying “Salesforce wants us to move to a competitor because some genius in their finance department has put some arbitrary date out there that they need to quit providing support by. I’ve never seen something so nuts because it means we are on the hook for an additional 18 months of subscription costs for a product they aren’t improving.” My source was in the middle of an expansion of its Zoomin project, adding new documentation files and features that were part of their development plans. This was one of the reasons why they chose Zoomin to begin with. “We don’t want to keep enhancing a dead platform,” he said. Now they have to look to another vendor. “Killing Zoomin without having something to step in doesn’t make any sense to me.”

My source did get various briefings, roadmaps, and other information, which he shared with me. These plans were short on specifics, such as a “timeline” — the quotes indicate my own skepticism about their plans. Key missing elements are any solid migration plan, or any guarantee how the existing Zoomin data structures would be integrated into Service Cloud, or what the new subscription costs would be, or if there would be additional charges to migrate the Zoomin data. I find this both distressing and somewhat ironic, given that one of the attractions of Service Cloud is its ability to integrate across many different databases and platforms.

You can see one page of this briefing below:

As you can see from this page, there are lots of “upcoming” features that are called out. Both of us have been around the software devops block many times to know these are placeholders in any timeline that indicate these are features that might never happen, or won’t happen any time soon. One other notable curiosity is that this document never mentions Zoomin explicitly.

Salesforce is on a tear to produce an agentic AI-based self-service portal that can be used for all sorts of purposes, including a superset of what Zoomin was starting to do with its platform. You might agree with this direction, even if agentic portals might not be ready for prime time. But whether this is removing a competitor, total vaporware, wishful thinking or an actual service remains to be seen.