Tablets have a special role to play as enterprises extend the reach of collaboration and productivity applications to increasingly mobile executives and other employees. This was made clear to me, first, at Dreamforce, the annual get-together of Salesforce.com’s customers, partners, developers and analysts; then in the course of a briefing from the product manager for Nuance Communications’ Flex T9 application.

At Dreamforce Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff led off the conference by introducing the “Social Enterprise,” and associating that term with “mobile, social and open.” The big factors in supporting the initiative in the cloud is encapsulated in the mantra, “Easy, Open, Everyone” which, in turn, is dependent on “Logic and data portability,” “no hardware or software,” and “pay as you go.” But for a firm that touts “no hardware or software,” the demos had a decided preference for Apple iPads as the hardware platform and widgets running within HTML5 as the preferred software at the presentation layer.

Salesforce.com has retooled its core product so that it will render consistently on both iPads and Android-based tablets. Called by its URL, “touch.salesforce.com,” it will be generally available in the first quarter of 2012.

I brought up Nuance FlexT9 in the lead paragraph because I was recently briefed on a new instantiation of the text-input application, shipped pre-loaded on the latest version of Lenovo’s ThinkPad Tablet. As a result, people who purchase the devices can go to “Settings” and choose to make FlexT9 the default means to input text. This, in turn, will enable them to “tap, trace, or write” as they prefer.

Refinements in the user interface at both the application and device level are key to both convenience and increased productivity. The product managers at Nuance, Lenovo and Salesforce.com recognize the trend to tablets and we expect to see more retooling of their offerings to accommodate the relatively bigger screen.

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Tags: Nuance, mobile applications, Salesforce.com, HTML5, dreamforce