Salesforce.com and Facebook Create New Opportunities for Enterprise Applications to Serve Facebook's 120 Million Users
Force.com for Facebook enables developers to create a new class of enterprise applications for
Facebook on Force.com
By bringing together the leading social and enterprise platforms, developers can use social
data from Facebook to power their Force.com apps
SAN FRANCISCO, CA - November 3, 2008 - Salesforce.com
[NYSE: CRM], the enterprise cloud computing company, and Facebook, the world's largest online
social community, today introduced a new suite of tools to marry next-generation business
productivity applications to the interpersonal power of social networks. The new offering -
Force.com for Facebook - is designed to foster a global development community for Facebook's 120
million users and salesforce.com's 100,000 developers. The move makes Facebook an
'enterprise-friendly' platform for global enterprises and individual entrepreneurs worldwide and
puts salesforce.com at the forefront of business applications for social computing.
"Facebook users are always eager to try new applications that can improve their ability to
connect and share in a trusted environment." said Sheryl Sandberg, COO, Facebook. "Our work with
salesforce.com will give developers the tools to create and deliver a new class of business
applications for Facebook's 120 million active users."
"We are seeing social meet CRM and the enterprise for the first time," said Marc Benioff,
chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. "This is the premier social graph fully integrating with the
premier enterprise cloud computing company----this is the true power of Internet."
Force.com for Facebook enables developers to easily use the Facebook APIs within their
Force.com applications. Freely available at http://developer.force.com, Force.com for Facebook
provides a new set of tools and services to enable developers to build applications that bring
together social data from Facebook with the database, logic and workflow and Sites capabilities in
Force.com and run them on salesforce.com's trusted global service infrastructure. The tools will
give developers a new means of creating business applications that greatly expand Facebook users'
ability to do corporate work on the site, by managing sales data, organizing business events or
automating marketing decisions
Developers Can Now Bring Together Facebook and Force.com
Platforms
With Force.com for Facebook, developers have new tools to bring together the Facebook and
Force.com platforms to build new kinds of social and business applications. Force.com provides a
complete feature set for the development and delivery of business applications. By leveraging the
social graph data on Facebook Platform, developers will have unprecedented capability to create
applications that take advantage of the best of both platforms. As with applications built on
Facebook Platform, users' data remains secure and can only be accessed by developers with users'
permission.
Developers can use Force.com for Facebook to:
-
Enable a new class of applications for business on Facebook
Platform. Force.com for Facebook enables the creation of applications that run 100 percent
as a service, powered by Force.com. Applications built and run on Force.com inherit all the
benefits of a proven platform, including security and sharing models, workflow, analytics,
customization, integration, and mobile access as well as the reliability, availability and global
scale of salesforce.com's trusted infrastructure.
-
Leverage Facebook Connect to enrich new and existing Force.com
applications with social data from Facebook APIs. The Facebook social graph layers on top of
the Force.com platform. With Force.com for Facebook, social data is now readily available to the
more than 100,000 developers in the salesforce.com ecosystem. Now they can leverage Facebook's
social graph to build a new class of enterprise applications.
-
Create new ways for Facebook users to share and connect. By
making it easy for Force.com developers to build robust applications in areas like recruiting,
productivity and project collaboration that can be quickly integrated through Facebook Platform,
users on Facebook will be presented with new tools for activities such as sharing a job opportunity
or collaborating with co-workers or friends on an event or project.
Apps-O-Rama (http://www.appsorama.com) is a developer of an online tool called Get Stuff Done
for Facebook that helps individuals and groups collaborate on projects on Facebook. Apps-O-Rama
built Get Stuff Done because they were frustrated by how hard it was to juggle all the activities
going in their lives, especially when other people were involved. Since projects are inherently
social, Facebook was a natural environment for a next generation project management tool. Now the
world can Get Stuff Done collaboratively within their Facebook network and reliably with Force.com.
Get Stuff Done can be used for anything users want to get done together, including sharing files,
creating and assigning "to-do" lists, managing projects and seeing what happened while they were
offline. It lets users go beyond group formation, and allows them to do things together such as
plan trips, organize events, move to a new apartment and much more.
"Our goal at Apps-O-Rama is to make working together in small groups dramatically easier than
ever before," said Jason Holloway, founder and CEO of Apps-O-Rama. "The development of our initial
version of Get Stuff Done in PHP took months to build and deliver. Using the Facebook and Force.com
platforms together we have been able to get a prototype of Get Stuff Done for Facebook running on
Force.com in just a couple of weeks."
Availability
Freely available at http://developer.force.com, Force.com for Facebook will help developers
build social and business applications that leverage the capabilities of Facebook Platform and
Facebook Connect including full support for FQL and API calls, FBML generation for native Facebook
applications, xFBML support, profile presence support, custom components for Facebook Pages and
more.
With the new tools, developers are given first class access to the Facebook APIs directly
within Force.com's Apex Code, enabling the creation of new applications and user experiences that
connect directly to Force.com's Sites, database, integration, Apex programming language, and
Visualforce user interface capabilities.
About Facebook
Founded in February 2004, Facebook's mission is to give people the power to share and make
the world more open and connected. Anyone can sign up for Facebook and interact with the people
they know in a trusted environment. Facebook is a privately-held company and is headquartered in
Palo Alto, Calif.
About Salesforce.com
Salesforce.com is the enterprise cloud computing company. The company's portfolio of Salesforce CRM applications, available at http://www.salesforce.com/products/, has revolutionized the ways that companies collaborate and communicate with their customers across sales, marketing and service. The company’s Force.com platform (http://www.salesforce.com/platform/) helps customers, partners and developers to quickly build powerful business applications to run every part of the enterprise in the cloud. Based on salesforce.com’s real-time, multitenant architecture, Salesforce CRM and Force.com offer the fastest path to customer success with cloud computing.
As of October 31, 2009, salesforce.com manages customer information for approximately 67,900 customers including Allianz Commercial, Dell, Japan Post, Kaiser Permanente, KONE, and SunTrust Banks. Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other press releases or public statements are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase salesforce.com applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available. 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 http://www.salesforce.com, or call 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE.
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