Salesforce.com held its annual Dreamforce conference in September 2007. The company officially launched its on-demand platform as the generic enterprise application platform called force.com. They also announced a major new component of force.com called Visualforce, which allows customizing and optimizing standard Salesforce.com screens for mobile browsers. The recent acquisition of content management vendor Koral was officially launched as Salesforce Content and numerous enhancements to the CRM products were announced.
The Platform as a Service
The biggest announcement at Dreamforce 2007 was the official launch of force.com, which releases the Salesforce.com on-demand platform to the enterprise as a generic application platform for internal development and delivery of enterprise applications using the software-as-a-service (or SaaS) model. Independent software vendors (ISVs) have already been developing applications on the platform for some years and now enterprise developers can do the same. Because of the existing API to the platform, enterprises will also be able to build hybrid applications if they wish, blending on-demand applications developed on force.com with legacy or new applications developed on other platforms, such as JEE or .Net. The platform also includes a sandbox feature, for running applications in an isolated test environment.
