The new Apex Content is a major extension of the Salesforce platform and is based on technology developed at San Francisco-based collaboration developer Koral, which Salesforce acquired in March.

Salesforce ContentExchange is the first service that lets customers manage documents and other unstructured data on demand as easily as they manage their structured data within the existing Salesforce CRM applications.

“Salesforce Content represents a decisive step towards our vision of managing all information on demand,” Salesforce.com chairman and chief executive Marc Benioff said.

“With Salesforce Content, we not only manage a company’s traditional structured information, but their unstructured information as well,” he said.

Benioff said the company revolutionised the sales force automation (SFA) market in 1999 by removing the cost and complexity associated with client/server software like Siebel. It now wanted to the same in the content management sector by extending the on demand software model and Web 2.0 innovations throughout the enterprise.

The Saleforce Content would compete with platforms like EMC Documentum and Microsoft SharePoint platforms, he said.

Salesforce ContentExchange will help companies store, share, find and manage the business information that currently lives in documents, emails and HTML – while keeping all users and content in sync.

Salesforce ContentExchange will take the best concepts of Web 2.0 applications such as community participation, tagging, recommendations, subscriptions, and an AJAX user interface and apply them to enterprise content management.