Last week I was at Dreamforce in San Francisco. The big announcement was Chatter. Chatter adds social networking to the Force.com platform.
This is huge. Not only can employees collaborate in the style of Twitter or Facebook, but so can applications.
This means that you can ask to be notified of different events. Groups can also be notified.
The fact that it is built into the platform means that any applications built on the platform can use Chatter.
You should check out the keynote videos, especially the day 2 keynote as the Appirio demo is a great example of how Chatter works.
Check out the keynote videos.
Holiday 2009
This was our fantastic holiday in France and Spain.
Adobe and salesforce.com have announced Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com. Everybody knows about Flash, the technology that powers loads of video sites and is usually used in ‘flashy’ photography sites.
It’s not really known as an enterprise platform, so why have they partnered with salesforce.com and their force.com platform? Well, for a while, Adobe have been pushing flash in a more enterprisey direction.
With sites and the force.com platform, salesforce.com has been moving in the opposite direction, allowing companies to create public facing websites on the Force.com platform. You could say that they have met in the middle.
Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com seems to be a combination of Eclipse, the Force.com eclipse plugin, the Flash(/Flex) Builder plugin and a souped up version of the Flex/Air Actionscript library.
Anyway, a salesforce.com backend with a flash UI is very exciting.