Salesforce.com and Adobe bring Flash to Force

A new partnership between Salesforce.com and Adobe promises to allow customers to build applications with richer user interfaces.

The companies claimed that developers building applications on the Force.com platform will be able to use a new offering called Adobe Flash Builder to easily deploy more interactive applications and video.

Customers will be able to use the tools to add drag-and-drop capabilities to business application interfaces, as well as data visualisations such as charts and dashboards.

The partnership will allow Adobe developers more flexibility when building applications, according to the firms, as they will be able to support desktop deployments through Adobe Air, and browser deployments using Adobe Flash.

A developer preview of Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com is now available on the Salesforce.com developer web site, and will be made generally available in the first half of 2010.

The partnership follows Salesforce agreements this year with Twitter, Box.Net and Cisco, all of which are aimed at bringing more interactivity to customers' cloud applications.

Salesforce customers can now monitor Twitter comments relating to their brand through their customer relationship management portal, and can use Box.Net collaboration features and documents from within their Salesforce accounts. The partnership with Cisco brings a telephony application suite to the online software.