Salesforce.com Launches Salesforce Chatter Developer Preview, Unleashing the Opportunity for Force.com Developers to Build Enterprise Social Apps

SAN FRANCISCO, March 15 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), the enterprise cloud computing (http://www.salesforce.com/cloudcomputing/) company, today launched the developer preview for Salesforce Chatter (http://developer.force.com/chatter), providing a select group of developers with access to the new social capabilities of the Force.com platform. In addition, the company will unveil Chatter DevZone - a Chatter-powered community where developers can share ideas, collaborate on building new social enterprise apps, and be the first to see the latest social apps developed by their peers, all while experiencing the productivity benefits Chatter offers.

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In the past, building social enterprise apps was unthinkable for developers. The cost and complexity of writing hundreds of thousands of lines of code, feeds, profiles, notification logic, and layers of permissions and security stood as impenetrable barriers to innovation with social capabilities. But with Chatter, every Force.com app a developer builds has social capabilities that can be enabled with just a few clicks. For the first time ever, developers can leverage the real-time breakthroughs by consumer services from Facebook, Twitter, and Google and apply them to create compelling enterprise apps all at five times faster and for half the cost of building on traditional software platforms.

Comments on the News

• "Developers have been asking, 'Why can't we build enterprise apps that are more like Facebook?'" said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. "With Chatter, they can. Developers can now add social capabilities like user profiles, status updates and real-time feeds to any Force.com app with just a few clicks."
• "Since deploying Chatter internally, salesforce.com has witnessed firsthand that real-time collaboration shatters traditional barriers to success," said Parker Harris, executive vice president of technology, salesforce.com. "We're launching the Chatter developer preview for our developer community so members can see what's possible with the collective creativity and imagination."
• "Companies are eager to innovate and create business apps that harness the power of today's real-time social features," said Denis Pombriant, founder and principal analyst, Beagle Research. "With the capabilities of the Chatter application and Force.com platform, companies, for the first time, can quickly and easily create social apps for the enterprise."

Salesforce Chatter Developer Preview -- The Conversation Starts Here

Since the launch of the Chatter private beta, the more than 230,000 Force.com developers have clamored for the opportunity to start building apps on the industry's first enterprise cloud computing platform with real-time social capabilities. In the developer preview, 5,000 select developers will receive a Chatter-enabled development environment to begin building social apps on the platform. Combining social capabilities like feeds and profiles along with salesforce.com's secure, trusted sharing model of the Force.com platform make building enterprise social apps five times faster and half the cost of traditional software platforms.

Salesforce.com is also unveiling the Chatter DevZone, a community Chatter deployment in which all preview developers can collaborate to innovate. In the Chatter DevZone, developers can share inspiration, use apps built by peers, and collaborate with each other to discover what's possible with Chatter. Developers can not only build breakthrough apps of their own, but also leverage other custom apps that no one else has access to yet. They can be the first developer pioneers of Chatter and inspire the ecosystem to accelerate the marketplace for Chatter apps.

Once Chatter is generally available later this year, the nearly 150,000 custom apps built on Force.com can instantly become social. Chatter will include a rich set of pre-built components that developers can use to build apps that leverage the real-time social capabilities including:

• Profiles: Developers can add profiles to any app on Force.com to promote collaboration across the organization with a consistent experience and real-time data.
• Status Updates: With Chatter, developers will be able to add status updates to any custom app so users in other apps, or even the apps themselves, will be able to provide updates. With this capability, it's easy for employees to monitor real-time activity across multiple business processes like recruiting, materials or any app.
• Chatter Feeds: The social capability of Force.com makes it easy to monitor critical business systems or discussions with real-time feeds. Any custom app built on Force.com can leverage Chatter Feeds that employees can use to make important business decisions and proactively solve problems.
• Groups: Custom apps built natively on Force.com will be able to add the group functionality from the Chatter app. Business users will be able to self-organize into groups and share updates, files and feeds directly within those apps.
• Application Updates: For the first time, developers can innovate with apps that automatically alert employees of changes to the status of a case, order, or project. This feature enables any object built using the Force.com platform to send updates to Chatter Feeds and profiles.
• Content Sharing: Developers can innovate and include the ability to share content, like documents, spreadsheets and presentations directly within their custom app.
• Security and Sharing Model: Leveraging the same sophisticated security and sharing model they use to build any app on Force.com, developers can build apps that share information based on the permissions and groups that companies choose to configure.
• Social Networks: Developers can easily pull Facebook information using Force.com for Facebook developer toolkit into their custom apps or create new apps that run on salesforce.com's secure, trusted and global infrastructure. Similarly, companies and developers will be able to filter the most relevant Twitter feeds into their custom Force.com apps. The integration helps custom apps remain relevant with the real-time content from Twitter.
• Google Developer Toolkit: Google Docs are naturally social because they run in the cloud. The Force.com platform is tightly integrated with the Google Data APIs, empowering custom apps with the ability to do things like push data into a Google Spreadsheet or query a Google Calendar.
• Chatter APIs: The social capabilities of Force.com is enhanced with a bundle of powerful APIs for feeds, profile, updates, and other components so developers can create new social enterprise business apps with these APIs to pull data from any app, including those on-premise, to make their apps more social, sticky, and relevant.

Pricing and Availability

• Salesforce Chatter is currently scheduled to be generally available in calendar year 2010. Customers who purchase salesforce.com technologies should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available.
• Salesforce Chatter will be included in all paid editions of Salesforce CRM and Force.com.
• Salesforce.com Developer Edition is available free of charge.

Supporting Resources

• For more information, please visit http://www.salesforce.com/chatter
• For more information about code share, please visit http://developer.force.com/codeshare
• Follow salesforce.com on Twitter @salesforce and join the conversation with #chatter

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 January 31, 2010, salesforce.com manages customer information for approximately 72,500 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.

Copyright (c) 2010 salesforce.com, inc. All rights reserved. Salesforce and the "no software" logo are registered trademarks of salesforce.com, inc., and salesforce.com owns other registered and unregistered trademarks. Other names used herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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