Salesforce.com's Visualforce Live in Summer '08 - a New Platform-as-a-Service Milestone that Enables the Creation of Any Interface for Virtually Any Device, Entirely in the Cloud

LONDON, May 7 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Salesforce.com Dreamforce Europe Conference -- Salesforce.com , the market and technology leader in Software-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service, today announced that its new Visualforce User-Interface-as-a-Service is now available to all salesforce.com customers with the release of Salesforce Summer '08. A key part of the Force.com Platform, Visualforce gives developers complete control over the Salesforce user interface to create any UI for any Force.com application and extend it to virtually any device. Salesforce.com today also announced the availability of Visualforce Components, new Visualforce technology that gives developers the power to add, remove, and reassemble the basic building blocks of the Salesforce UI. With Visualforce Components, ISVs and IT departments can manipulate the components of the Salesforce UI, add their own custom-built components or bring in ISV-built components to quickly build business applications on Force.com that are as easy to use as the best Web 2.0 apps. The availability of Visualforce signals a new milestone for the Platform-as-a- Service industry, providing unprecedented control over the user interface of business applications delivered entirely via the cloud.

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"Visualforce gives developers the ability to make their business applications on Force.com as easy to use as Web applications like Amazon, Google and Salesforce," said Marc Benioff chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. "With Force.com Platform-as-a-Service and Visualforce we're giving ISVs and IT departments the power to harness the Internet to deliver any user experience to virtually any screen or device."

"Visualforce opens up a new world of possibility for user interface design," said Jeremy Roche of CODA, one of the largest European financial software providers. "Visualforce has helped us to build compelling user interfaces packed with powerful business logic for our CODA 2go accounting system on Force.com."

Force.com Build and Deliver Any Business Application as a Service

The Force.com Platform-as-a-Service allows ISVs and companies to build sophisticated business applications without installing and managing hardware or software, letting them focus on innovation instead of infrastructure. More than 60,000 custom applications have already been built on Force.com, including simple apps such as project management and approval tracking as well as sophisticated applications such as financials and contract management.

The Force.com Platform encompasses a complete feature set for the creation of business applications, including the ability to create any database, 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, Force.com Development-as-a-Service to provide a comprehensive set of tools and services for developers, and Visualforce for a framework to build any User-Interface-as-a-Service.

"Visualforce is enabling us to stream-line business processes for our clients," said Adam Caplan, President, Model Metrics, a leading SaaS systems integrator. "Visualforce gives us complete pixel-level control over the user interface and the ability to deliver custom interfaces and experiences based on our clients' specific needs and requirements without having to manage any infrastructure."

Visualforce: Design and Deliver Any User Experience Anywhere As a Service

A breakthrough for the Platform-as-a-Service industry, Visualforce is a new technology for developing powerful user interfaces (UIs) that can be used to enhance the standard Salesforce SaaS applications or to create custom PaaS applications on Force.com. Visualforce includes all the resources developers need to build rich, interactive applications and user experiences for a variety of audiences, applications, and devices. More than 4,000 developers have already created more than 11,000 custom interfaces in the Visualforce developer preview program.

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 Adobe Flex, for business applications, making them as innovative and as effective as their consumer Web counterparts. Visualforce features include:

-- Pages - this capability enables the design definition of an application's user interface. -- Components - this provides the ability to create new applications that automatically match the look and feel of Salesforce applications or easily customize and extend the Salesforce user interface to specific customer and user requirements. -- Apex Controllers - The controller enables customers to build any user interface behavior. -- Static Resources - Provides the capability to easily create, reference, and manage the assets used to create UIs-including images, style sheets, JavaScript libraries, and other browser components. -- Inline Page and Controller Editing - In Visualforce development mode, customers can edit Visualforce pages and Apex controllers directly from the runtime view of any page.

New Visualforce Components Will Revolutionize Web 2.0 Applications for the Enterprise

With the consumerization of the enterprise, CIOs and IT departments are under pressure to deliver business applications that are as easy to use as their Web 2.0 counterparts.

A new feature of Visualforce and the Force.com Platform, Visualforce Components gives IT departments and ISVs the ability to create Web 2.0-style applications by assembling different UI components to create custom user interfaces and deliver the same compelling user experiences in their business applications that their users get in their consumer lives at home.

Visualforce Components are the basic building blocks of the Salesforce user interface, and include things like fields, headers, list views and more. With Visualforce Components, salesforce.com has componentized the Salesforce UI, giving developers the power to add, remove, create and reassemble the different parts of the user interface on their pages and screens to correspond to the specific needs and requirements of their applications. Visualforce Components will help ISVs, system integrators and IT departments speed development cycles and improve the usability of their applications.

Visualforce Components gives developers the power to reuse components they have already created, use components built by salesforce.com, or bring in UI components created by third parties. Developers can incorporate data and logic from external systems, such as interactive charts and other data visualizations, adding visual appeal to applications. Navigation, mashup components, data entry forms, mobile device components, calendars and more are examples of the many kinds of components that can be brought into UIs created with Visualforce on the Force.com Platform. Visualforce Components additionally includes:

-- Rich Component Library Visualforce Components will include a library of more than 50 components that represent standard Salesforce UI elements such as including fields, headers, list view, sidebar, detailed lists, related fields and more. Developers can selectively include these elements in their designs without having to redesign them from scratch. Through cascading style sheets (CSS), developers can extend the styles of these components to match any application-specific requirements. -- Custom Components Developers can bring custom interface patterns and other customizations into Visualforce as components for simple reuse throughout their application interfaces. Custom components can leverage standard components, other custom components, and the Apex Code programming language to combine information from across applications, even from applications that don't run on the Force.com Platform. Availability

Visualforce and Visualforce Components are included in all Salesforce Editions in conjunction with the release of Salesforce Summer '08.

About salesforce.com

Salesforce.com is the market and technology leader in Software-as-a- Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). The company's portfolio of SaaS applications, including its award-winning CRM, available at http://www.salesforce.com/products/, has revolutionized the ways that customers manage and share business information over the Internet. The company's Force.com PaaS enables customers, developers and partners to build powerful on-demand applications that deliver the benefits of multi-tenancy across the enterprise. Applications built on the Force.com platform, available at http://www.force.com/, can be easily shared, exchanged and installed with a few simple clicks via salesforce.com's AppExchange marketplace available at http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/.

As of January 31, 2008, salesforce.com manages customer information for approximately 41,000 customers including ABN AMRO, Dow Jones Newswires, Japan Post, Kaiser Permanente, KONE, Sprint Nextel, 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.

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