Intranet Journal — Salesforce.com Offers Invitation-Only Collaboration

Tom Dunlap — 9 January 2007
Central Desktop, a respected and rapidly growing online collaboration system, has announced a deeper relationship with Salesforce.com.

Users of Salesforce.com, which provides subscription-based customer relationship management software online, can now collaborate with their customers and partners in a private, secure, invitation-only extranet.

The deal is part of Salesforce.com’s AppExchange, which initially got off to a slow start. Central Desktop for AppExchange becomes one of more than 400 applications that are now available on salesforce.com’s AppExchange, the world’s first on-demand application directory.

Salesforce.com launched AppExchange in January 2006. This is an online market place for application programs. They run as add-ons to Salesforce.com’s hosted CRM (customer relationship management) services.

Marc Benioff, the company’s chairman and CEO, said at the time that: “We’ll take a killer app on the Internet — salesforce.com — and transform it into a platform, just as our predecessors [i.e. Microsoft] did in the PC marketplace.”

Since then, over 250 partners have built or adapted over 500 applications programs for AppExchange. They did so using Apex, the company’s own, Java-like, programming language. This is now becoming widely available (see here). Apex includes a workflow engine, a user interface model, a Web services API and a real-time messaging and integration feature.

Central Desktop is one of a range of collaboration services available through AppExchange. Here’s a list.

As Salesforce.com has shown, the idea of software as a service has an appeal to smaller organizations. Whether signicant numbers of large organizations will ever take it up is still questionable. Last week’s Lotusphere announcements showed no sign that IBM, at least, is detecting such an appetite among its customers. There, it was all still about organizations hosting application programs on their own servers.