Salesforce.com announced that Salesforce Winter '08 is now live, delivering Force.com Platform-as-a-Service features for developers and customers to build and deploy any application on demand. Salesforce Winter '08 also marks several new milestones in on-demand innovation, including the developer preview of Visualforce, a breakthrough technology that enables developers and ISVs to design any application, for any user, anywhere with the world's first User Interface-as-a-Service. And, Salesforce Winter '08 offers optimized support for Apple's new Safari 3 browser, bringing Apple's legendary user experience to salesforce.com customers. Finally, the Salesforce Winter '08 release also expands Salesforce from four to six application product lines, adding Salesforce Content and Salesforce Ideas to its award-winning suite of Software-as-a-Service applications.

The Force.com Platform-as-a-Service offers the most comprehensive set of capabilities for building any application on demand. Force.com Platform-as-a-Service provides the building blocks necessary to create and deploy any business application and lets companies and developers focus on what their applications do, rather than the software and infrastructure to run them. By replacing the complexity of software platforms with a complete, scalable service, Force.com provides developers the fastest path to turn ideas into business impact. The multi-tenant Force.com platform encompasses a complete feature set for the creation of business applications, including the ability to create any database on demand, a workflow engine for managing collaboration between users, the Apex Code programming language for building complex logic, the Force.com Web Services API for programmatic access, mash-ups, and integration with other applications and data, and Visualforce for a framework to build any user interface.

Now in developer preview, Visualforce gives customers the power to design application user interfaces for any experience on any screen. Combined with the powerful logic and workflow intelligence provided by Apex Code, Visualforce offers the flexibility to meet the requirements of applications that feature many different types of users on a variety of devices. Visualforce uses the best of Internet technology, including HTML, AJAX and Flex, for business applications, making them as innovative and as effective as their consumer Web counterparts. Visualforce will enable the creation and delivery of any user experience, offering control over an application's design and behavior that is only limited by the imagination.

Salesforce Winter '08 also adds support for Apple's Safari 3 browser. Safari brings Apple's legendary user experience to both Windows and Mac users and delivers full support of open Internet standards. Safari 3 features easy-to-manage bookmarks, effortless browsing with easy-to-organize tabs and a built-in RSS reader to quickly scan the latest news and information.  With Salesforce Winter '08, all Salesforce applications and the Force.com platform are optimized for use with Safari 3.

The Salesforce Winter '08 release also expands Salesforce from four to six application product lines, adding Salesforce Content and Salesforce Ideas to its award-winning suite of CRM applications. Built using the same technology behind salesforce.com's IdeaExchange, Salesforce Ideas enables customers to identify innovative ideas from their communities. Salesforce Ideas brings the wisdom of crowds to businesses for the first time by allowing online communities to submit, discuss and promote ideas. In addition, Salesforce Content empowers companies with a host of Web 2.0 technologies, like tagging, subscriptions and recommendations, to bring the power of on demand to the unstructured data within an enterprise. By adding these two new applications to Salesforce Sales, Service, Marketing and PRM applications, the release of Salesforce Winter '08 makes multi-category, multi-application success available to all 900,000 salesforce.com subscribers.

Salesforce Winter '08 is available immediately to all salesforce.com subscribers. Visualforce is currently available in developer preview. Customers who purchase salesforce.com applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available.

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