Salesforce made a number of interesting announcements at their recent global Dreamforce conference, increasingly expanding their CRM platform into communications and collaboration scenarios

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Social Enterprise Today has a nice write-up summarising the recent Dreamforce 2012, the annual conference hosted by Salesforce.com. The conference was rumoured to have over 90,000 registered attendees! (Originally heard it was 70,000) Up from 42,000 in 2011 and 23,000 in 2010. A popular puppy.

Key feature announcements included:

• Chatter Communities: Chatter is Salesforce’s version of Twitter/Instant messaging, adding in communities makes it very similar to Yammer and pure social software platforms such as Jive.
• ChatterBox: A new cloud-based file sharing app. Curious choice of name, given the established niche players Box and DropBox…
• Mobile client based on HTML5: as opposed to going native on each device platform. It was originally announced last year but is now available. A smart move – web sites can be made responsive to fit small screens but to be productive requires a different UI
• Sales and Marketing clouds: Spreading further beyond CRM and Service Desk management, heading into the earlier pre-sales stages.

Whilst the sales and marketing announcements very much continue the theme of spreading CRM and service management from the earliest pre-sales stage through to post-sales support, the Chatter announcements are an interesting shift into collaborative working and social software in the workplace. Salesforce is currently priced very much as an enterprise application but is increasingly looking like a platform for the whole range of information and communication activities…

See related post: Analysis of cloud platforms for social software solutions