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.
Salesforce.com executives and Sandberg showed off how a recruiting app made on the Force.com platform could be embedded into a Facebook page. The app leveraged the social aspects of Facebook to determine what "friends" on the service might be a leading candidate for a job listing.
Such an example shows how business focused application can use Facebook's "social graph," what Sandberg and the company's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, (in his public appearances) refer to as showing the connections between friends, family and colleagues.
Facebook, which has nearly 28,000 applications on its platform, has not generally been focused on enterprise or productivity. As Sandberg noted during her part of the keynote, Facebook apps have focused on games, sports, music, and advocacy.
"We think there is more a more for a need for productivity and enterprise apps," Sandberg says. "You can build it on force.com and run it on our platform. We think this partnership is a really exciting step."
Last week, LinkedIn, the social network for professionals, launched a very focused application platform that brought nine applications to users. Analysts called it a departure from the playful, game-like applications of Facebook.
This announcement could turn the LinkedIn news on its head, seeing as the enterprise apps developed on Force.com are very business-focused and allow for customized company processes.
"It's bringing the two platforms together," Benioff says. "It changes what you can do on Facebook's social graph. You can create social applications, such as social CRM."