Content management 2.0 from Salesforce

Way back at the turn of the century the Irish poet William Butler Yeats said, “Things fall apart: the center cannot hold.” Who knew he could have been talking about core enterprise applications.

As promised this morning, here’s a follow up, post-Salesforce.com event, on what’s new and interesting.

[Video: Salesforce’s Marc Benioff on becoming the next platform player]

There was quite a bit of both. For more details you can see our news story, Salesforce wants to be a content manager.

What I liked about the content management system Salesforce unveiled is how they use the latest Web 2.0 technology to make content management, especially for unstructured data, easy and even fun to use.

In the old days, the reporter who drew the short straw was sent off to the content management conference. It’s different now.

Salesforce, taking a page from the consumer Web, will offer the kinds of functionality that up until now was not available on a corporate level.

To do that, Salesforce bought a SaaS company called Koral whose service will now be integrated into Salesforce and become the content management service on the site.

Here’s a quick list of what you can do and I’ll elaborate on some: share, tag, subscribe, rate and comment, recommend, content connect.

Tag — Some of the cool stuff you can do is create multiple tags for your content like you would on a consumer site for sharing pictures, like Flickr, so that users can search for content using different key word descriptions.

Subscribe — The service allows you to receive alerts if a document is updated. Also if someone adds new content with the same tag topic you can receive an alert. You can even subscribe to an individual and be alerted whenever that person posts content to the system. It also suggests to the user how they might want to tag an item.

Rate and Comment — Users will also be able to rate or judge content like you can with books on Amazon. If you have a list of content in a repository the content that gets the most hits displays in larger type so that you can see what the most read content is.

What remains a bit cloudy is this. Are all of these features accessible if you store your content in backend systems or does it only work if you put it into Salesforce’s content repository?

While Marc Benioff, CEO, told the audience that you can easily link to content stored in other backend systems, it wasn’t clear during his explanation if you could get the same functionality.

Also, if the system is to become a true content management system for your company, uploading all of that data to Salesforce might be expensive. Salesforce gives you the first gigabyte of storage free but after that it costs. If your company is a large enterprise we are talking about storing terabytes of data.

Which brings up the other question that remained unanswered. Does the Koral system include archival and search capabilities for unstructured data that will allow it to become the system of record for e-discovery?

Are the search and retrieval capabilities up to that level of sopohistication? I will report back on that.

The other interesting announcement was around Salesforce’s intention to target the Appex development platform to ISVs.

Using the same principle that drives SaaS, which is companies don’t want to have to make huge investments in infrastructure in order to deploy new services and applications, the Salesforce development platform will allow ISVs to focus on their core strength, innovation, and let Salesforce host the infrastructure. Sounds like a good idea to me.

Finally, I asked Benioff if Salesforce was content to be a plug-in to a core application like SAP or does it want to become the core around which all other applications circle?

I think he dodged the question a bit. I think so because he refused to admit that what I am convinced of is true. But he did say something interesting, “there is no core.”

I don’t think that is quite true yet, but there is a lot happening out there around software at a very rapid pace, and Benioff may just turn out to be right.