All Salesforce customers using software-as-a-service (SaaS) interfaces can now design them as they like, announced the firm at its European customer and partner event Dreamforce.

“Visualforce allows users to create any application with any interface,” said Marc Benioff in his keynote. It is now available to all Salesforce customers with the release of Salesforce Summer 2008.

One product demonstration shown at the event and launched by finance technology specialist Coda was the use of the Salesforce platform to create an on-demand enterprise accounting system. The system is fully integrated with Salesforce’s CRM application and allows users a more integrated business process. For example users can create an invoice at the click of a button and then post the transaction to the sales departments, said the firm.

The Salesforce Summer 08 release will also allow customers and partners to collaborate in Salesforce Content via a portal. A content analytics feature will use metrics to track the most frequently used content among sales and marketing representatives.

Salesforce Ideas, a SaaS capability that allows customers to post, discuss, and vote on ideas of their customers and employee communities, is also to be enhanced. Companies will be able to create multiple communities to better organise ideas coming from different group. Benioff also mentioned in the keynote the pilot of ideas-as-a-service with coffee giant Starbucks

Benoiff was keen to introduce his idea of “platform-as-a-service” (PaaS), which he said would be brought forth with Web 3.0.

He said soon the days of constantly publishing content and putting content in applications will be replaced with platforms such as its own platform, Force.com, as well as those such as the Google App Engine, Amazon Web Services and Facebook. “This paradigm shows you can build [applications] in the cloud,” he said. “Unlike the old platform, you have more freedom to choose in Paas,” he added.

Benoiff criticised the software development path as “expensive, risky and complex,” adding, “There will never be another software platform developed”.

In related news, data integration firm, Informatica has announced a new software-as-a-service offering called Informatica On Demand, which allows Salesforce administrators to automate Salesforce integration processes.