Salesforce.com and Facebook create new opportunities for enterprise applications to serve Facebook’s 120 million users

Salesforce.com [NYSE: CRM], the enterprise cloud computing company, and Facebook, the world’s largest online social community, has 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, organising 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, customisation, 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, organise 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.