The announcement was made jointly by , Salesforce.com's CEO, and , COO of Facebook, at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco.

"Businesses are reaching consumers on Facebook," says Facebook's Sandberg. "One of the most common questions we hear [from those businesses] is how do we use Facebook more? We have a page there, and it's going well, but how do I use the power of Facebook to really engage in a deeper way with these constituents?"

She continued, "By coming together with Force.com, we believe we can open up productivity and enterprise apps for our users," she says.

Developers using the Force.com platform can create an enterprise application there, then run it through what Sanberg called the Toolkit for Facebook, which allows the same application to run on Facebook.

The Force.com application will appear embedded in Facebook, but (and this might be to the delight of enterprise IT managers) it is hosted on Salesforce.com's Force platform, which is regarded as enterprise-grade while Facebook's infrastructure is regarded as consumer-grade.