Salesforce.com ushered in its annual Dreamforce conference with a slew of announcements, including partnerships with key platform companies such as Facebook and Amazon.com, enhancements to its Force.com platform, and enhancements to its core CRM solution.

At Dreamforce in San Francisco, Salesforce.com, which refers to itself as "the enterprise cloud computing company," announced to thousands of its users and developers that its Salesforce CRM Winter '09 release has gone live. And with more than 50 new features, Salesforce CRM Winter '09 enables customers to manage their customer interactions across sales, marketing and customer service. Salesforce CRM is built on the Force.com platform.

Company officials said Salesforce CRM is helping more than 47,700 enterprises and 1.1 million subscribers better serve their customers without any of the cost, risk or complexity of traditional, on-premises software.

Meanwhile, for developers, Salesforce.com delivered the Force.com IDE (integrated development environment) for Winter '09. In an interview with eWEEK, Peter Coffee, director of platform research at Salesforce.com, cited the new IDE as one of many highlights for developers among the Dreamforce announcements.

And in a blog post, John Plax, a Salesforce.com staff blogger, described the Force.com IDE as "a powerful client application for developing, testing and deploying Force.com applications."

According to Plax, the Winter '09 release of the Force.com IDE contains the following major new features:

• New Metadata Support in Winter '09 includes new Analytics and Translation Workbench components, an expanded Custom Object definition, Apex class templates, and more. 
• Metadata Component Directory displays a complete list of the metadata components in your organization available for downloading into your Force.com project.
• Simpler Project Structure removes package folders, so metadata components are easier to find and synchronize regardless of what packages they are in. 
• Documentation and User Assistance adds 40 new IDE topics, context-sensitive help for all IDE dialogs, wizards and actions, and the complete Force.com platform documentation and tutorials.
• Usability Enhancements add a friendly Start Page and improve wizards, screens, commands, editors and error handling in the Force.com IDE.