Salesforce Playing Nicely With 3rd Party Cloud Storage

Salesforce.com has said that it is running a private beta for the Salesforce Files, the new name for the service of Chatterbox file-synching that it unveiled last September at Dreamforce. The Salesforce Files makes it easy for the corporate files which are stored on the third party systems to be effortlessly available to the marketing and sales team so that they can make decisions quickly and seal the deals faster. This is according to Salesforce Chatter executive vice president and General Manager, Nasi Jazayeri, during a press conference that was held at the headquarters of Saleforce.com, in San Francisco.

Several enterprises are now storing the corporate files on Microsoft, Dropbox, Google Drive, SharePoint and other management systems for the cloud-based content. The process of finding these files and making sure they are available to the sales and marketing teams can be a very tedious one and time-consuming. Jazayeri however said that Saleforce.com does not replicate or host files on the third party systems and it is also not for selling Files as an individual service, and thus it should not be taken as a step against Dropbox and other vendors of cloud storage. He said that Files instead provided a standardized user interface to the company files that are on the systems of the third party. He added that Saleforce.com stores the metadata that is used to point where the corporate files are located, and then from the location, they are streamed to the personal computers or mobile phones of the customer.

Saleforce.com is currently making use of APIs from the third party dealers and it is also utilizing CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Service), which is an open standard used  for the connection to the properties of the content. During the same conference held at the company’s headquarters, Saleforce Chatter’s senior manager, Anna Rosenman, said that one of the customers’ largest ache points with Chatterbox has been connecting to the corporate files that are in the data stores of the third party outside Saleforce.

Rosenman said that the customer were all the time saving and storing the files in very many places and therefore Saleforce did not want to make another storehouse to for such use. Saleforce.com has the intention of weaving Saleforce Files into their entire core products, and it is also planning to build an entire ecosystem around it at one point. This is according to Jazayeri. For the time being, Saleforce Files involves only the accessing of the corporate files and making them available to the sales and marketing teams of their clients. However, according to Jazayeri, the dealer has the intentions of adding another feature for document editing at some point in future.

Currently, the Saleforce Files includes the technology from the acquisition of EntropySoft, which is a content management dealer that is based in French, by Saleforce in the month of February. Saleforce.com is currently managing a beta version of the service and it is also planning to make the service available to the public in the February of next year.