Salesforce Summer ’08 Now Live - Bringing the Power of Cloud Computing to the Enterprise

Visualforce is now live in all editions - a new Platform-as-a-Service milestone that enables the creation of any interface for virtually any device, entirely in the cloud

Salesforce Content and Salesforce Ideas brings the power of Web 2.0 collaboration to your employees, customers and partners
SAN FRANCISCO .- Salesforce.com [NYSE: CRM], the market and technology leader in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), today announced that Salesforce Summer ’08 is live to all 43,600 salesforce.com customers. Salesforce Summer ’08 represents salesforce.com’s 26th release in 9 years and delivers the power of cloud computing to the enterprise. Part of the Force.com platform, Visualforce is now live in every edition of Salesforce, enabling users to develop any interface entirely in the cloud. Salesforce Content and Salesforce Ideas are also delivering new levels of customer success in Salesforce Summer ’08 including the support of external communities, delivering true Web 2.0 collaboration capabilities to users globally. In total, more than 50 new CRM features are also live with Salesforce Summer ’08, raising the bar for industry innovation.

“Consumers have been enjoying Web 2.0 features like voting and social networking on consumer web applications like Digg and Facebook for years. But traditional enterprise applications are still stuck in the ’90s,” said George Hu, executive vice president marketing, applications and education at salesforce.com. “Salesforce.com is changing all that by delivering Web 2.0 interfaces and collaboration technologies in Salesforce Summer 08.”

“As the CRM market continues to evolve, the integration of Web 2.0 technologies into CRM processes is a key step in driving greater end user productivity by making applications more intuitive to use,” said Rebecca Wettemann of Nucleus Research. “Salesforce.com’s advances in content and ideas management - as well as the release of Visualforce - in Salesforce Summer ’08 gives developers more tools and options to drive greater collaboration and increased productivity for users.”

Visualforce is Now Live - Enabling the Creation of Any User Interface
A breakthrough for the Platform-as-a-Service industry, Visualforce is a new technology for developing powerful user interfaces (UIs) for any application built on Force.com, including Salesforce. Now, salesforce.com customers, partners and developers can develop interfaces just as elegant as the industry’s leading technologies. Visualforce includes all the resources developers need to build rich, interactive applications and user experiences for a variety of audiences, applications, and devices. More than 4,000 developers have already created more than 11,000 custom interfaces in the Visualforce developer preview program.

Combined with the powerful logic and workflow intelligence provided by Apex Code, Visualforce offers the flexibility to meet the requirements of applications that feature many different types of users on a variety of devices. Visualforce uses the best of Internet technology, including HTML, AJAX and Adobe Flex, for business applications, making them as innovative and as effective as their consumer Web counterparts. Visualforce features include:

* Pages - this capability enables the design definition of an application’s user interface.
* Components - this provides the ability to create new applications that automatically match the look and feel of Salesforce applications or easily customize and extend the Salesforce user interface to specific customer and user requirements.
* Apex Controllers - The controller enables customers to build any user interface behavior.
* Static Resources - Provides the capability to easily create, reference, and manage the assets used to create UIs-including images, style sheets, JavaScript libraries, and other browser components.
* Inline Page and Controller Editing - In Visualforce development mode, customers can edit Visualforce pages and Apex controllers directly from the runtime view of any page.

Harnessing the Power of Collaboration for Employees, Customers and Partners
Salesforce Summer ’08 empowers companies to use Web 2.0 collaboration technologies to transform their business and partner, customer and employee communities.

Salesforce Content brings the power of SaaS to managing unstructured data within an enterprise by utilizing the best of consumer Web technologies such as tagging, subscriptions and recommendations. Salesforce Content users manage their documents and unstructured data directly in Salesforce to improve productivity and effectiveness in every corner of the enterprise.

Salesforce Content, with the introduction of Summer ’08, is the perfect complement to all of the Salesforce CRM applications. Companies can now collaborate in Salesforce Content with their partners and customers in the Salesforce Partner Portal and Salesforce Customer Portal. Using the appropriate portals, partners and customers will be able to quickly and easily gain access to relevant content.

“Now we can collaborate with our entire community. With Salesforce Content, we have enhanced the experience of our customers by delivering the right information when it’s needed most,” said Steven Frers, Vice-President of Service and Support at CompassLearning.

Salesforce Summer ’08 delivers additional new features for Salesforce Content including:

* Global Availability - Recognizing that it is becoming increasingly important for businesses of all sizes to work with companies across the globe, salesforce.com is making Salesforce Content now available in all supported 15 languages. Users can now tap into the power of multi-language search to find relevant materials, no matter where they are or what language they speak.
* Content Analytics - Content Analytics ends the guessing game when it comes to the effectiveness of corporate materials. Usage metrics can now effectively be tracked to determine the most frequently used content among sales reps, marketers and other users. Based on the data gathered from dashboards and reports, the documents, presentations and other materials in Salesforce Content are optimized for maximum effect.

The second pillar in salesforce.com’s collaboration applications is Salesforce Ideas, an entirely new type of application that enables customers to tap into the innovative power of their customer, partner or employee communities by allowing them to post, discuss, and vote on ideas. Leveraging the power of Force.com Platform-as-a-Service, Salesforce Ideas makes it easy to manage top ideas from inception to implementation.

Since its release, Salesforce Ideas has enabled companies to effectively engage with their internal and customer communities. With the release of Salesforce Summer ’08, companies can capture the unique perspective of their partner community by including Salesforce Ideas in the Salesforce Partner Portal.

With Salesforce Summer ’08, Salesforce Ideas benefits from additional new features including:

* Multiple Communities - This new feature enables companies to create multiple communities in order to better organize and segment the ideas coming from different groups, and provide participants with a forum to engage with the specific communities that most apply to them.
* Customizable Ideas - With Salesforce Summer ’08, users can customize fields in Salesforce Ideas and expose data directly to the original posting. Closely integrated with the Force.com Platform-as-a-Service, Customizable Ideas also allows users to set up validation rules, workflows and Apex triggers off keywords alerting companies to relevant conversations taking place within their communities. With Customizable Ideas, companies can monitor and respond more effectively to the demands of their communities.

Salesforce for Google Apps - First Cloud Computing Suite for Business Productivity
In April of 2008, salesforce.com and Google came together to announce their second joint product, Salesforce for Google Apps, an entirely new way for business professionals to communicate, collaborate, and work together in real time over the Web. A simple, yet powerful combination of essential applications for business productivity (email, calendaring, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, instant messaging) and CRM (sales, marketing, service and support, partners), Salesforce for Google Apps offers a complete way for businesses to harness the power of cloud computing without the cost and complexity of managing hardware or software infrastructure.

Availability
Salesforce Summer ’08 is available immediately to all salesforce.com subscribers. Salesforce Content is available at $35 per user, per month. Salesforce Ideas is currently available for customer, partner, and employee communities. It is included with all CRM editions for internal use, with the exception of Group Edition, at no additional cost. For additional employees, Ideas Only licenses can be purchased for $5 per user, per month. For customers and partners accessing Salesforce Ideas through the portal, standard portal pricing applies. Customers who purchase salesforce.com applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available.

Force.com Platform and the AppExchange
Force.com (http://www.force.com/) reinvents the traditional development, deployment and distribution of any business application with platform-as-a-service. Developers, customers and partners can use Force.com to easily create a new generation of on-demand applications and deploy them worldwide as a service. Force.com allows applications to be easily shared, exchanged and installed with a few simple clicks via salesforce.com’s AppExchange marketplace, enabling all the innovation that Force.com unleashes to be easily distributed to the entire on-demand community.

The AppExchange economy continues to expand, with thousands of customers installing applications via the AppExchange. Customers of all sizes can quickly and easily extend Salesforce with additional on-demand business applications available on the AppExchange, found at http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/.