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Enterprise Software - Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Salesforce Buys Content Management Startup Koral

Salesforce.com has purchased Koral, a San Mateo-based startup that created a Web content management service tied to Salesforce.com. Terms of the purchase of Koral were not disclosed.

Here is Koral's current key feature list:
+ store and share your documents online with your collaboration partners (colleagues, customers, suppliers)
+ permission content to particular users
+ apply multiple tags your content, rather than having to put them in a folder structure; the application suggests tags to you based on the text in the content
+ search for content by author, published dates, document type, tags [use made of tag clouds]
+ subscribe to content, authors, tags and receive notifications via email/rss
+ preview content online [all documents are rendered into flash]
+ post discussion/comments on content in threads
+ apply content rating
+ see who has subscribed to content and when they accessed that content

Koral fits in with a new major area of expansion for the Salesforce which will make the company relevant to all types of employees, rather than only sales people. Later this year, Salesforce.com will release ContentExchange which is designed to help people view and manage Microsoft Office documents and multimedia files.

Salesforce.com also plans to release the content management and collaboration software as a standalone service called Apex Content which may be used by software developers who want to create hosted applications.

Koral's content collaboration software includes a tagging system popular with consumer apps.