One of the key messages from Dreamforce 08 was the coming ability to build what are called Force.com Sites.  These sites are websites you can build to extend the reach of CRM and your own built apps on the Force.com platform to people who don’t use Salesforce.  This extends the your ability to gather data and build some great apps both on public websites and corporate portals that leverage your data and applications in Salesforce.

Monday night at Dreamforce, the Developer Community held a Hackathon where you got a hands-on look at Sites and a chance to compete for great prizes building your first site.  My good friend Johan built his first site and even won an iPod for the effort.  He built a site for employees to request access to Salesforce.  It could be integrated into a corporate portal and makes use of both the standard and custom fields on User records to not only allow users to request access, but you could even use workflow to auto-provision users and then assign a task to the Admin to give the profile a human-eye once over before activating it.  This fills a gap we’ve seen in how to get non-users of Salesforce on their way to accessing Salesforce.

I also had the chance to talk to a fellow passenger on my flight back to MSP about how he’s thinking of using Sites.  He manages franchise retail outlets around the country.  They use Salesforce to track much of the information the collect from those locations, but they don’t give each location access to Salesforce.  Today, they have to gather the data through email and manually input a lot of data.  His vision for Sites is to open a portal for those retail locations and allow them to enter the data directly to Salesforce, eliminating any double entry and really strengthening the process of data collection.  Tie that with workflow and you’ve saved a ton of time.

What have you thought about doing with Sites?  To this point, Salesforce and the Force.com platform have been pretty much a walled garden of your data, and of course much of it can and will stay that way.  But start thinking of what you could start managing through both internal and external uses of Sites.  Force.com Sites is currently in Developer Preview, but based on history, it’s probably not more than a few months from public availability.  To learn more about Force.com Sites, visit the Developer website and start imagining.  There’s also a webinar you can attend on December 2 to learn more about it.