Salesforce Unveils Latest Cloud Computing Offering
By CXOtoday Staff
Mumbai, Jun 23, 2008

Salesforce.com provider of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) announced that Salesforce Summer '08 is live to all 43,600 salesforce.com customers.

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. With this, more than 50 new CRM features are also live with Salesforce Summer '08, raising the bar for industry innovation.

Steve Russell, CEO (APAC) of Salesforce.com said, "In Asia Pacific, the appetite for SaaS is tremendous. With the recent introduction of Salesforce Summer '08, we now offer customers in India a higher level of freedom and choice in on-demand applications. Companies of all sizes can now have full access to innovative technologies that will help them thrive in today's competitive market." Said Steve Russell, Chief Executive Officer, APAC, Salesforce.com.

According to Rebecca Wettemann of Nucleus Research, 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. The release of Visualforce in Salesforce Summer '08 aims to give developers more tools driving collaboration and increased productivity for users.

Visualforce is a new technology for developing powerful User Interfaces (UIs) for any application built on Force.com, including Salesforce. With this, the Salesforce.com customers, partners, and developers can develop interfaces. 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 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.

Salesforce Summer '08 empowers companies to use Web 2.0 collaboration technologies to transform their business and partner, customer and employee communities. With Salesforce Content, companies can now collaborate 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.


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