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Platform as a Service

With the Winter ’08 release, salesforce.com introduces Force.com, the world’s only platform as a service that lets you build any application, any database, any logic—and run it all on demand on salesforce.com’s trusted, secure infrastructure. Winter ’08 also marks the debut of Visualforce (in developer preview), a breakthrough technology for designing any user interface for Salesforce applications and custom applications. Plus, Winter ’08 includes a number of new Web 2.0 usability features like inline editing and personal tagging; and numerous platform enhancements, like relational business rules, Apex email services, and the Eclipse toolkit for Force.com. Read more about all the new platform features in Winter ’08.

Software as a Service

Built on the power of the Force.com platform, Winter ’08 showcases the future of on-demand today, with new levels of usability, CRM functionality, and even entirely new, innovative applications. Winter ’08 marks the introduction of two completely new applications for salesforce.com customers: Salesforce Ideas and Salesforce Content. Winter ’08 also delivers powerful new CRM features like account/contact audit history, opportunity roll-ups, campaign hierarchy, and much more. Read more about the new CRM features in Winter 08.

Create and Run Any Application on the World's
First Platform as a Service

What if developers could focus on creating applications that precisely solve their companies’ business problems, rather than the software and infrastructure to run them? Welcome to the new world of platform as a service (PaaS). By replacing the complexity of software platforms with a complete, scalable service, Force.com provides developers the fastest path to turn ideas into business impact.

Bring the Power of Your Community to CRM

Just as Force.com and Visualforce showcase the future of platform as a service, Winter '08 also unveils the future of software as a service by delivering breakthrough CRM applications that leverage the power of your community. And the hottest new capability in community is crowdsourcing, which enables you to solicit ideas, votes, advice, and opinions from your communities. Salesforce enables crowdsourcing in two new applications to source and elevate the best ideas from your customers, partners, and employees.

Build a Community of Ideas

The Winter '08 release reinvents the way that organizations source ideas from their communities. The new Salesforce Ideas application helps companies build their own community Web sites to collaborate directly with partners, employees, or other communities in an interactive, online forum.

Create Community

Create one or more community sites for sharing and voting on ideas. Any of your Salesforce users can participate. Collaborate on product features, branding, and more.

Interact Directly

Hear from and interact directly with any member of the community. Anyone can post, and your team can respond with answers, clarifying questions, and additional insight.

Vote on Ideas

Just like on the consumer Web, the best ideas on Salesforce Ideas rise to the top as community members vote. Watch as your community weighs in.

Manage and Share Content with Your Community

With Winter '08, your team can use Salesforce to share unstructured content such as documents, spreadsheets, presentations, videos, and much more. The new Salesforce Content application takes the best features of the consumer Web and applies them to enterprise content management.

Publish and Tag Content

Users can publish content with relevant tags for categorization. Published documents such as spreadsheets, presentations, and even PDFs are automatically indexed and are easy for users to find thanks to full-text search.

Rate Content

User ratings ensure that the spotlight shines on the best, most useful content. Finally, sales will know which presentation will help seal the deal, and marketing will have a direct feedback loop from the field and can make better decisions about where to invest limited content-development resources.

Specialized roles require specific content. Users can subscribe to the tags, authors, and/or content of interest, and they'll receive a notice when relevant content is updated.