Salesforce.com Sites, cancel your website integration projects...

I was at dreamforce when this was announced, and we are all really excited here about the release of sites.

As companies move more and more to the web, it's becoming imperative that your internal CRM system communicates in some way with your website.

Previously with salesforce.com, you only had a few options, for example, Lead Capture forms, Case Capture Forms, Public Customer Support Knowledge Bases, or Customer / Partner portals which neeeded authentication.

There have been many integration projects, connecting salesforce.com to a website, in order for it to deliver dynamic content on the public web... these integration projects are always costly and difficult to execute correctly.

Now with Force.com Sites, it really becomes as simple as a button push.

Any data you have in salesforce.com can be rendered as a "Site", which is essentially a public visualforce page.

So if you have a product catalogue, or if you want to display all your upcoming company events (e.g. Campaigns), or if you have content published in the Documents or Content area in salesforce.com, you can now selectively expose this directly to your public website - just build a 'Sites' Visualforce page, and you are done.

So if you have ever wanted to expose your CRM data directly to the website, in an un-authenticated way, but thought integration was too risky, complicated or expensive, I would suggest you take a close look at Sites.

See a bit of a demo here:
http://www.salesforce.com/platform/sites/