Salesforce.com Announces Salesforce Content - Extends Salesforce Applications and Platform to Manage Unstructured Information On Demand
o New Apex Content extends the Salesforce Platform to manage all enterprise information on demand - structured and unstructured
o New Salesforce ContentExchange application delivers Web 2.0 content management across the enterprise
o Salesforce.com acquires Koral, as key enabling technology for Salesforce Content
SAN FRANCISCO, April 10 -- Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM), the technology and market leader in on-demand business services, today introduced Salesforce Content, a dramatic expansion of its platform and application strategy for managing and sharing all business information on demand. Apex Content, a major new extension to the Salesforce platform, will harness the power of Web 2.0 and community participation to enable the creation of a new generation of content-based applications. Salesforce ContentExchange, a new on-demand application built on the new platform technologies, is the first service that will enable customers to manage their documents and other unstructured data on demand as easily as they manage their structured data within the existing Salesforce CRM applications. Salesforce Content will bring the benefits and success of salesforce.com's on-demand model to every employee in every corner of the enterprise.
"Salesforce Content represents a decisive step towards our vision of managing all information on demand. With Salesforce Content, we not only manage a company's traditional structured information, but their unstructured information as well," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. "In 1999, salesforce.com revolutionized the SFA market by removing the cost and complexity associated with client/server software like Siebel. Now, Salesforce Content will liberate customers from complex content management software like EMC Documentum and Microsoft SharePoint by extending the on-demand model and Web 2.0 innovation throughout the enterprise."
"Salesforce ContentExchange takes Web 2.0 concepts and ties them to the enterprise," said Rob Finn, business development associate, Edison Venture Fund. "With great community features like tagging and the rating system, Salesforce ContentExchange will provide a huge boost to finding the best quality content."
Apex Content - New Platform Capabilities for Building Content-Based On- Demand Apps
With Apex Content, salesforce.com will be the first provider of platform services for unstructured data such as office documents, HTML, video/audio files and email. Companies no longer need to buy bloated on premise document management software to build applications that are based around documents and other content. Apex Content will provide a content platform that will fuel Salesforce applications, including AppSpace, Salesforce PRM, and Salesforce Wealth Management Edition, to manage and share all kinds of documents on demand. With Apex Content, developers will be able to create new kinds of content applications for compliance, clinical trials, digital asset management and more. Apex Content will allow business applications to utilize these technologies for the first time in order to manage and share unstructured data. Applications built with Apex Content will also have an AJAX user interface for easy customization. Additional new platform capabilities in Apex Content will include:
o Workspace Management -- Workspaces are virtual locations where defined
groups can securely manage and share information. They allow companies
to rapidly collaborate across departments and even across companies
where different user groups will need different access rights to
information. They also make rapid set-up and tear-down of project-based
collaboration easy to manage.
o Library Services -- Apex Content will provide library services
functionality required in any robust enterprise content management
system, including a content repository, check-in / check-out services
for locking documents while they are being edited, and version control
to manage the history of changes and provide the ability to revert to
old copies. Apex Content will deliver superior version control services
by embedding intelligent IDs into every document, helping ensure that a
company's knowledge base doesn't contain multiple versions of the same
document. Apex Content will also provide comprehensive auditing that
records every event associated with a piece of content -- whether it has
been shared, downloaded, printed or changed -- providing insight into
the quality of information and how it is being used.
o Content Classification Schema -- The consumer Internet has shown us that
lightweight collaboration and content management is best served by a
community-based classification schema known as "tagging." However,
there are many business scenarios in which a more controlled approach to
corporate content is required. Apex Content will allow companies to
easily configure customizable content types and determine what meta-data
should be captured with each content type. By simultaneous providing
both the community and the controlled classification approaches, Apex
Content will meet the needs of all types of collaboration around
content.
o Full Text Index -- Apex Content will provide a Full Text Index service
that scans all contributed content, creates rich search indexes and
ensures that users can more accurately locate relevant content. The Full
Text Index will be horizontally scalable allowing rapid search results
even across large data sets and large user communities.
o Workflow -- Building business processes around corporate content
requires rules that help control the flow of unstructured data around
the organization allowing interactions such as document approvals,
routing documents for work management and concurrent review of
documents, such as CAD files, across many people. Apex Content Workflow
Services will allow rules-based interactions to be defined and workflow
interactions to be initiated.
Salesforce ContentExchange - Web 2.0 Content Management for the Entire Enterprise
The first application to be built on and fully harness the power of Apex Content will be Salesforce ContentExchange. Salesforce ContentExchange will help companies store, share, find and manage the business information that currently lives in documents, emails and HTML -- while keeping all users and content in sync. Salesforce ContentExchange will take the best concepts of Web 2.0 applications such as community participation, tagging, recommendations, subscriptions, and an AJAX user interface and apply them to enterprise content management for an easy to use solution. By applying the principles of Web 2.0, Salesforce ContentExchange will deliver an on-demand content management application for the entire enterprise that compliments the way users work today in their personal lives.
Salesforce ContentExchange will revolutionize the way companies manage knowledge by eliminating the folder-based approach to organizing group content. Users will be able to quickly and easily find exactly what they need without having to look through cumbersome folder hierarchies. Users will also be able to subscribe to their favorite content, receive updates and recommended content to other users. Additional features of Salesforce ContentExchange include:
o Share -- One of the biggest barriers to adoption in legacy content
management systems has been the difficulty in how users contribute their
documents and knowledge to the system to share with the rest of the
company. Salesforce ContentExchange will enable users to easily publish
their content and share it with other users.
o Tag -- Much like Flickr showed consumers how to tag photos with labels
such as 'Venice' and 'canal' making it easier for groups to find these
photos, Salesforce ContentExchange will let users tag business
documents. Using tags such as 'competitive' and 'presentation', users
will be able to easily find relevant documents without knowing the name
of the document. The more the community adds tags to corporate
documents the easier it becomes for others to find them. This approach,
popularized in the consumer Internet world as "folksonomy," enables
users tap into the wisdom of the crowd.
o Subscribe -- Salesforce ContentExchange will enable applications to
operate on a subscription model. When users are subscribed to documents,
they will be automatically alerted whenever the document is updated.
Salesforce ContentExchange will also allow users to subscribe to topics
or authors so that users are in control of what information they
receive. For example, if a user in the legal department wants to know
when any new documents are created on Sarbanes Oxley compliance, he can
receive them automatically by subscribing. Or if the same employee wants
to know any time the head of the department writes a new report, he can
subscribe to that individual and will automatically be alerted when she
publishes something new.
o Rate & Comment -- Just as consumers check online ratings and comments
before booking hotels or buying a digital camera, Salesforce
ContentExchange will provide a rating system for end-users to score
content quality and to write comments about the content -- providing a
feedback loop not only to the creator of the content but also to all
future potential users.
o Recommend -- Much like Netflix lets users recommend movies, Salesforce
ContentExchange will recommend the best documents for users based on
keywords, tags, and user ratings. With recommendations, business users
will be able to more easily find the right documents for their needs.
o Content Connect -- Contributing a document or other content to
Salesforce ContentExchange will be effortless -- content is simply
dragged and dropped into Content Connect to be added to the application.
Salesforce ContentExchange will also automatically recommend how to
classify documents and will automatically index all submitted content,
making it easy to find. This functionality will make collaboration
simple, which leads to improved business productivity.
Pricing and Availability
Pricing and availability of Salesforce ContentExchange and Apex Content is scheduled to be announced later this calendar year.
Apex Content and Salesforce ContentExchange will be based on technology acquired from Koral Technologies. Salesforce.com acquired Koral in March 2007. Terms were not disclosed.
Salesforce.com chairman and CEO Marc Benioff will host a press conference at approximately 12:00 pm PDT today at the Four Seasons Hotel in San Francisco. Press, analysts and investors may access the event by visiting http://www.salesforce.com/investor
About salesforce.com
Salesforce.com is the market and technology leader in on-demand business services. The company's Salesforce suite of on-demand CRM applications allows customers to manage and share all of their sales, support, marketing and partner information on-demand. Apex, the world's first on-demand platform, enables customers, developers and partners to build powerful new on-demand applications that extend beyond CRM to deliver the benefits of multi-tenancy and The Business Web across the enterprise. All Apex components and applications can be easily shared, exchanged and installed via salesforce.com's AppExchange directory, available at salesforce.com/appexchange. Customers can also take advantage of Successforce, salesforce.com's world-class training, support, consulting and best practices offerings.
As of January 31, 2007, salesforce.com manages customer information for approximately 29,800 customers and approximately 646,000 paying subscribers including Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), America Online (AOL), Avis Budget Group, Inc, Dow Jones Newswires, Polycom and SunTrust Banks.
Salesforce.com has headquarters in San Francisco, with offices in Europe and Asia, and trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "CRM". For more information please visit www.salesforce.com/, or call 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE.
Source: salesforce.com, Inc.
CONTACT:
Gordon Evans,
salesforce.com, Inc.,
+1-415-536-7608,
gevans@salesforce.com
Web site: http://www.salesforce.com/
