Salesforce.com introduces Force.com Sites, dramatically expanding Force.com’s role in cloud computing for the enterprise
Bringing the power of Force.com to every Web application and Web site Force.com Sites will enable customers to run their Web sites in salesforce.com’s cloud Easily publish Force.com data and applications to any Web site –reaching new users and communities
Like all salesforce.com services, Force.com Sites runs entirely in the cloud without the cost and complexity of traditional software. Force.com Sites is now available in developer preview at http://developer.force.com.
“With Force.com Sites, customers can run their Web sites in our cloud,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. “Force.com Sites will enable a dramatic expansion of Force.com’s role in cloud computing for the enterprise. We expect our community to unleash entirely new kinds of applications and innovations that will truly drive our vision of 'The End of Software.’”
"Running our business on Force.com has been night and day compared with our previous client/server infrastructure," said Michael Wolverton, CEO, Cathedral Partners, a marketplace that connects buyers and sellers of privately held companies. "Our business revolves around our interactive Web application, a marketplace to connect buyers and sellers. With Force.com Sites we were able to get our marketplace up and running in a matter of weeks instead of the months it had taken with our previous architecture."
"Force.com Sites changes the entire paradigm for building applications," said Narinder Singh, Founder and Head of Technology and Marketing, Appirio. “Companies no longer have to consider separate architectures and approaches depending on where the users are. Running Web sites in salesforce.com’s cloud removes cost and complexity and allows companies to extend existing applications beyond their own four walls."
Force.com Sites: Run Your Site on Salesforce.com’s Cloud
Force.com provides a comprehensive platform for building and running business applications in the cloud.
The Force.com platform provides the necessary building blocks to quickly build and run business applications including database, workflow, logic, integration, customisation, and user interface capabilities. Force.com also enables data and applications to be easily extended to mobile devices. Force.com does this without requiring customers to manage and maintain additional client/server infrastructure.
Force.com Sites now extends those capabilities to allow companies to share business data and applications on Force.com to external users and Web sites. Force.com Sites reduces the cost and complexity of managing Web infrastructure, and enables companies to be more responsive and interactive with their users and communities.
Web sites and Web applications run using Force.com Sites gain all the benefits of the proven security, reliability and scalability of salesforce.com’s trusted global infrastructure. Publishing business data and applications to the Web using Force.com Sites requires only a few steps to get up and running:
- Build an application on Force.com, using its sharing models and security rules
to define what data and information to make public
- Use Visualforce to build the Web site’s external, public facing pages
- Register a Force.com domain name
- Publish and run the site on salesforce.com’s global trusted infrastructure
Force.com Sites will unleash a new wave of business applications that extend beyond the walls of the enterprise. With Force.com Sites, salesforce.com customers can now take the more than 85,000 custom applications they have built on the Force.com platform and extend them to their external communities and users. Customers can use Force.com Sites to:
- Build and run new Web applications with Force.com Sites. Customers can build
public facing Web sites, such as consumer reviews, hotel concierge services or event registration
sites that are tightly integrated with an internal business application running on Force.com.
- Transform business applications into Web sites by sharing a view of an
application on a public Web site. For example, Force.com Sites provides the capability to extend a
recruiting application to power a public-facing job portal. Force.com Sites can be used to quickly
and easily add, update and delete new job listings, directly from a recruiting application.
Visitors to a Force.com Sites-powered job listing site can interact directly with information in a
recruiting application that has been shared externally.
- Extend the Salesforce CRM applications through the creation of interactive Web-to-lead forms, enabling site visitors to signal interest in products and services via a Web site. Force.com Sites also enables the quick and easy creation of campaign landing pages integrated directly with Salesforce CRM.
Through an early adopter program, several salesforce.com customers and partners were able to use Force.com Sites to build prototype applications on Force.com. Some of the participants in the early adopter program included:
- Astadia, one of salesforce.com’s largest global system integrators, built an
application that allows organisations to deploy a full-lifecycle recruiting application on their
website in less than a day.
- Appirio, a leading partner of salesforce.com and Google Enterprise, created four
sites:
- An online market place for Cathedral Partners to match private businesses and
investors or buyers.
- Jobs4MyFriends, a new Facebook application that extends a company's ability to
use employee networks to reduce the cost and increase the quality of their recruiting and hiring.
- A Web application for a global entertainment company that allows its hosts to
manage interactions with their most frequent visitors. Hosts can control what events are offered,
dynamically create personalised messages and offers for visitors, and allow patrons to request
trips.
- A Web recruiting application for ThomasNet, a provider of vertical listings for
more than 2,000 industrial markets and companies.
- Bluewolf, a leading software-as-a-service consulting firm and salesforce.com
partner, built a community networking web portal for the healthcare industry that enables customer
reviews, mash up of dentist locations, information on what services they provide and more.
- Jobscience, a provider of Human Capital Management applications on the Force.com
platform, built a “new employee” on-boarding system for Washington Regional Healthcare, a hospital
client that hires hundreds of new employees each year.
- Model Metrics, a premier consulting partner of salesforce.com and application
developer on the Force.com platform, created CardLasso, an application that enables users to
capture images of business cards from a mobile device camera and transcribes the information into
data files in multiple formats, including lead records in Salesforce CRM.
- Sofia Works, a leading provider of Force.com technology applications, built an on-demand Boat Marina reservations system for Marina VIP, a team of entrepreneurs with a vision to bring on-line booking to the boating world.
Force.com Sites developer preview pricing is based on monthly page views:
Group Edition includes up to 50,000 monthly page views
Professional Edition includes up to 250,000 monthly page views
Enterprise Edition includes up to 500,000 monthly page views
Unlimited Edition includes up to 1,000,000 monthly page views
Additional monthly page views are available for order:
- $1,000/month for up to 1,000,000 additional monthly page views (regardless of
Edition)
- $3,000/month for up to 5,000,000 additional monthly page views (regardless of Edition)
About Salesforce.com
Salesforce.com is the market and technology leader in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). The company's portfolio of SaaS applications, including its award-winning CRM, available at http://www.salesforce.com/eu/products/, has revolutionised the ways that customers manage and share business information over the Internet. The company’s Force.com PaaS enables customers, developers and partners to build powerful on-demand applications that deliver the benefits of multi-tenancy across the enterprise. Applications built on the Force.com platform, available at http://www.force.com/eu/, can be easily shared, exchanged and installed with a few simple clicks via salesforce.com's AppExchange marketplace available at http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/As of July 31, 2008, salesforce.com manages customer information for approximately 47,700 customers including ABN AMRO, Dow Jones Newswires, Japan Post, Kaiser Permanente, KONE, Sprint Nextel, 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/eu/.
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