Salesforce.com celebrates 25th release of Software-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service featuring new salesforce content and Salesforce Ideas collaboration applications

Salesforce.com [NYSE: CRM], the market and technology leader in Software-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service, has announced that Salesforce Spring '08 is live to more than one million salesforce.com subscribers.

Salesforce Spring '08 extends salesforce.com's CRM leadership to become a multi-application leader with breakthrough innovations for its two newest applications – Salesforce Content and Salesforce Ideas. The 25th generation release also marks salesforce.com's evolution to become a multi-category company with Force.com Development-as-a-Service now live, bringing the world's first on-demand developer tools and services to the salesforce.com community.

"Salesforce Spring '08 establishes salesforce.com as not only the recognised leader in CRM, but also marks the company's evolution to become a multi-application, multi-category leader," said George Hu, executive vice president marketing, applications and education at salesforce.com. "The SaaS and PaaS model enables constant innovation, which benefits all Salesforce users."

"Salesforce Spring '08 adds important innovations in how individual users leverage sales-related content, how companies build and manage communities of customers, and how developers create on-demand applications for their own business users," said Rebecca Wettemann, Nucleus Research. "Salesforce Ideas and Salesforce Content leverage Salesforce.com's experience in Web interactions, while Development-as-a-Service provides IT with a way to innovate with on-demand."

Multi-application Leadership - Salesforce Content and Salesforce Ideas - Empowering User Success
The Salesforce Spring ‘08 release features breakthroughs in salesforce.com's new community applications, Salesforce Content and Salesforce Ideas, that enable businesses to tap into the power of their communities.

Salesforce Content empowers companies by delivering a revolutionary application for Content Management. Salesforce Content brings the power of SaaS to managing unstructured data within an enterprise by utilising Web 2.0 technologies such as tagging, subscriptions and recommendations. By enabling users to manage their documents and unstructured data directly in the Salesforce application, Salesforce Content improves productivity and effectiveness across the board.

The Salesforce Spring '08 release adds a number of new features that help customers find the most relevant content for every user, including:

• Featured Content – Saves employees time and increases the usage of preferred materials by ensuring that preferred content is always prominently displayed by allowing authorised users to define and designate materials as "Featured Content."
• Suggested Tagging - Provides greater flexibility and control in aligning how users tag content by allowing administrators to recommend a specific set of tags for a workspace, while still allowing users the option of creating their own tags.
• Popular Search Results – Makes finding the best content easier by allowing users to display and sort search results using pre-defined fields and order to navigate content more easily.

"Salesforce Content is as revolutionary as PDFs were 15 years ago. For us, it is the killer app," said Bill Rozier, vice president of Global Marketing, Ciena. "The ability to use easily understandable Internet techniques to manage the publishing and retrieval of our marketing materials allows us to maximise marketing's impact with our sales teams world wide – on demand."

Salesforce Spring '08 also brings new innovations to salesforce.com's revolutionary application for Ideas Management. Salesforce Ideas is an entirely new type of SaaS application that enables customers to tap into the innovative power of their customer, partner or employee communities by allowing them to post, discuss, and vote on ideas.

Salesforce Spring '08 adds a number of new features to Salesforce Ideas, enabling customers to spark conversations with their communities, including:

• My Ideas Inbox - A personalised experience for users that enables them to access their ideas and comments with greater ease and efficiency by listing new comments that have been added to ideas previously posted and/or ideas commented on by the user.
• Recently Discussed - The Recently Discussed tab deepens the user experience by providing quick access to the community's latest comments, making it easy to jump into the latest discussion topics and take conversations in new directions.
• Top Ideas – Provides improved visibility into the latest, most relevant content and votes by ranking the all-time top-ranked ideas within the community.

"We know that our employees have a lot of opinions and great ideas and were looking for an innovative way to tap into them," said Kevin Weiss, sales development manager, MARS drinks, a division of Mars Incorporated. "We recently rolled out Salesforce Ideas and are excited to capture and share the insights of our employees to improve our organisation."