 "Salesforce.com Extends Social Enterprise Platform")
Salesforce.com, the enterprise cloud computing company, has extended its Social Enterprise Platform to welcome even more companies and enterprise developers to the cloud. With three offerings – Force.com, Heroku and Database.com – the Social Enterprise Platform changes the way companies collaborate, communicate and share information with customers and employees. These announcements – including the general availability of Database.com, Heroku for Java and new social and mobile capabilities on Force.com – give companies additional paths to becoming social enterprises through the development of social, mobile and open apps.
“We’ve built the Social Enterprise Platform from the ground up to give companies the tools they need to build their social enterprise,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com.
The Social Enterprise Platform delivers a real-time, multitenant application development environment that allows companies of any size to engage with customers and employees in dynamic new ways. With three proven offerings – Heroku, Force.com and Database.com – salesforce.com delivers the most comprehensive platform for enterprise developers to build cloud applications.
Database.com, the underlying cloud database already serving the company’s 100,000+ customers, is now generally available to all enterprises. Database.com’s sophisticated identity and access management capabilities ensure that the right data gets to the right people, at the right time, with the right access permissions. Database.com includes powerful social APIs that are based on concepts that have been proven effective within the world’s most popular consumer social networking applications. Data feeds, profiles, groups, comments and “likes” provide a framework for collaboration within the context of a customer’s business data. Enterprise developers are free to pick the language (including Java, C#, Ruby, PHP), the platform (such as Force.com, Heroku, Amazon EC2), and the device (write natively to Android and iOS, for example).
Force.com is salesforce.com’s proven cloud platform for building and running social, mobile and real-time employee social networks and apps. It has a community of more than 400,000 developers who have built and deployed more than 240,000 custom applications. Force.com offers Chatter Connect which allows companies to extend Chatter to any custom or third-party application to make it social. The Chatter REST API is the key, making it easy for developers to integrate Chatter into other, non-social applications such as Intranets and portals, custom mobile apps and other enterprise apps. In addition, Chatter for SharePoint allows companies to make SharePoint social. With it, companies will be able to embed Chatter feeds in a SharepointMySite or TeamSite and share documents from Sharepoint to Chatter. As a result, employees can rapidly collaborate across their company and service customers more effectively.
Leveraging open, standard HTML5 technology, touch.salesforce.com will allow users to access salesforce.com apps from the most popular smartphones, tablet devices and operating systems, providing optimal experience and customisations for touch devices. Touch.salesforce.com will also make the Force.com platform the destination for developing mobile apps. Developers will be able to build new mobile apps quickly and easily, and all native apps built on Force.com will be mobile.
Visual Workflow Cloud Designer allows users to model and deploy powerful logic-based business processes entirely in the cloud. Users will be able to easily collaborate on business workflows using the simple drag-and-drop designer to instantly automate workflows. Visual Workflow Cloud Designer will also let partners and ISVs create new capabilities and to integrate with third party applications.
Siteforce is a Web content management system for managing all of a company’s marketing websites with unprecedented agility. Web developers will be able to use its drag-and-drop studio to build pixel-perfect sites, and business users can edit content in seconds. Designed for the cloud, Siteforce makes it fast and easy to deploy, add sites and scale traffic.
Heroku is the leading cloud platform for building and deploying social customer apps and product social networks. Heroku now gives more than 6 million enterprise Java developers a clear path to build social, mobile and open cloud apps. Enterprises and developers have made significant investments in Java skills. Now, those skills and investments can be applied to creating the social enterprise by developing customer and product social networks. Heroku will be offered to enterprises with 24x7 support, application monitoring, continuous deployment and elastic scale. Delivering Heroku through a trusted enterprise sales channel enables more organisations to take advantage of the agile platform to create exciting new social and mobile applications.