Salesforce.com’s new product Salesforce Communities is intended to enable any enterprise to create private social communities to connect with customers and channel partners.
The company said Salesforce Communities will combine social networking features such as profiles, real-time feeds, trending topics, recommendations and influence measurement, with the business information and processes in Salesforce. With Salesforce Communities, users can engage in new levels of collaboration and productivity through custom, branded communities.
For the channel, Salesfroce Communities connects with customers, suppliers and distributors in a customized way to drive more sales through seamless deal registration, access to sales tools and collaboration with the right experts, according to Salesforce.com.
It can also connect with any community and be able to deploy communities to support any business process – from franchises sharing best practices, to high-end retailers delivering custom shopping experiences, to universities looking to connect students with alumni.
Salesforce Communities is built on the Salesforce Platform which can help users to build and deploy branded communities through the private sharing model of the Salesforce Platform. This will also enable people to move across multiple communities with a single identity; and, scale to support communities of all sizes – from a few people to communities with millions of members.
According to Salesforce.com, the number of social networking users has surpassed e-mail users. Nearly a quarter of all time spent online is spent on social networks like Facebook.
Salesforce Communities is currently scheduled to be available in limited pilot in fall 2012. Salesforce Communities is currently scheduled to be generally available the second half of 2013. Pricing of Salesforce Communities will be announced at general availability.