Salesforce Content

I have some outstanding blog posts to catch up with; principally from Ryan Carson's Fuel Conference but I also came across this neglected post that I started at the Dreamforce Europe conference. To explain: I have got into the bad habit of starting blog posts without finishing them. I get the majority of the content down but then fail to finish and publish. I'll have to see what I can do about that.

Anyway, I have some photographs of the Salesforce Content screens and I thought it was worth putting them out there for others to see.

Tim Barker, who is the product manager for Salesforce Content, was presenting and these are some raw notes that I made during the presentation along with some photographs of the screens.

I met Tim last year when we were doing some work for one of the large banks. We were looking at a way of automatically aggregating and managing content to deliver to users in Salesforce. There was no API for Salesforce Content back then, which meant that it was a bit of a non-starter for us - as we needed to dynamically insert content into Salesforce. I asked Tim the API question again at the end of his talk - and unfortunately there is still no API for Salesforce Content.

The Ajax UI is a bit of a departure for Salesforce. And a welcome one at that. I met Dani Pletter, who was the Lead UI Architect on Salesforce Content, when I was out in San Francisco for Google IO. He is now working on a major redesign of the main Salesforce UI so I think we can expect more good Ajaxy stuff like Content in the main app. We showed him some of the things we have been working on (K-Framework, iSalesforce) where we have been trying to reshape the way that you can interact with Salesforce.

Tim began his talk by explaining some of the inspiration for the different aspects of Salesforce Content: search with keywords (Google), preview before download (YouTube), tag content (Flickr), filter search results (Expedia), rate and review (Amazon), create custom alerts (Yahoo! Alerts).

The pictures aren't great and I apologise for that but you can see the screen details.

Every user has a workspace that displays featured content, top content, recent activity, and popular tags.

It is possible to build filters to narrow the set of content displayed

You have a full preview of the document available to you in the browser before you download it.

Version tracking is supported

Content can be voted on and comments can be added

Users can subscribe to a document's feed which will alert them of any changes to the document. It is possible to subscribe to either a workspace or a document and control the frequency of alerts.

Content can be tagged. There are three types of tags: open tags (anything goes), guided tags (user can create their own tags or select from the suggested list), restricted tagging (users can only tag content with suggested tags).

All of the information about the document is stored in Salesforce. Document workspace membership, for example, is controlled through Salesforce user profiles. It is also possible to obtain feedback and data on content usage. Salesforce Content is available in Customer and Partner portals.

There is no limit to the size of documents that can be uploaded, there is no restriction on bandwidth, there is no restriction on the file types that can be uploaded. Pricing is based on total storage across an org. Uploaded content is handled differently with respect to preview and search et cetera - for example, the text in .doc, .pdf and .html documents is indexed for search. The use of content in workflow and approval processes will come later in the year.

Salesforce content comes from the acquisition of Koral. Salesforce themselves use Content across their 3,000 users and collated and published about 15,000 documents as part of the initial roll-out.