Since the introduction of AppExchange in 2005, Salesforce.com has fostered developments of “add-on” applications and features by 3rd-Party developers. It is certainly a two-way street, as developers enhance their own offerings when new features are added to the Force.com cloud. So it is that e-signature and contract management software provider EchoSign is able to integrate Salesforce.com’s Chatter (a Twitter-like microblogging/IM service) to monitor a contract’s progress through its signature process in real time.

As Opus Research reported here, Chatter was introduced at DreamForce in November 2009 to provide a mechanism for intra-company social networking. It embeds a Twitter-like crawl into the Salesforce.com Web page so that users can monitor messages from the people they follow without leaving the Salesforce.com Web page (or portal).

Three years ago, EchoSign’s electronic signature management solution was one of the early offerings in AppExchange. Today Salesforce.com claims that it has “800 ISV partner applications” among the 150,000 or so custom applications used by salesforce.com’s customers around the world. Using the app involves faxing or uploading a document to an EchoSign’s e-signature resource where where a designated signer can use the resource to affix a legally binding electronic signature before using the EchoSign platform (and Force.com) to distribute the signed contract among the parties and departments involved. As integrated into Salesforce.com, the signed documents are archived for later retrieval as well and progress is recorded into the activity log in Salesforce.com.

EchoSign’s service is being offered through AppExchange 2, an updated 3rd Party program that takes advantage of Saleforce.com’s “Cloud 2” which is an upgrade of its core platform as a service (PaaS) which adds better support of mobility, social networking and real-time communications.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Salesforce.com, CRM, Recombinant Communications