Back in September we blogged on the new offering from salesforce.com: do.com. At that time no one really knew much about what it would do, although with some educated guess work many people, us included, thought that it might be linked to Manymoon, which salesforce.com acquired.
Yesterday Marc Benioff tweeted “Check it out www.do.com! Now live.”
Cue a flurry of people trying to access the site. Sadly it’s currently invite only and even those who have requested invite codes don’t all have them yet, but no doubt these will be forthcoming in the next few weeks. Beta invites being trickled out slowly are immensely popular, with Spotify being one tech-firm who have made this model work for them in recent years; but early reports of those who do have access are very positive.
“Do.com is for anyone and everyone,” says Sean Whiteley, Salesforce’s Senior Vice President, in an interview with RWW. “We’re calling this a prosumer application. It’s the closest thing to a consumer app we’ve ever done.”
In December 2010 salesforce.com purchased the open cloud platform Heroku. Then yesterday, Salesforce.com unleashed do.com, which would seem to be a Heroku-based service, but integrated with Gmail (and presumably Google Apps) and indeed Outlook.
The concept is a social-cloud task management and collaboration platform, aimed at corporate and personal users. Think Chatter on Steriods.
Techcrunch report that do.com allows small teams and individuals to manage task lists, organize projects, and capture notes. The app allows you to assign tasks to other users (non-Do users can be sent an email to join), and in joint tasks, users can comment on tasks, accept and reject assignments and more.
Do also serves as an Evernote-like application and allows you to take notes from within the app, and assign yourself tasks from parts of your notes.
As Salesforce says, the app is meant to be used for both everyday consumer, list management use as well as for small group use within a business. So you can use the app to plan a dinner party or coordinate a marketing launch. Once you have a number of different tasks with shared users, you’ll see a Chatter-like Activity Feed, with real-time alerts and access to any comments on specific tasks.
The app is available via a web-based HTML5 app, as well as an iOS app. Do will also be available in the Google Apps Marketplace, Salesforce App Exchange, Chrome Web Store and LinkedIn App Marketplace. Any actions in one of these apps will be synced across your Do account. And Do is integrates with Dropbox so you can share files within the application from the file sharing service.
Do is free for now but Salesforce says eventually it will be adding paid features such as administrative controls and customization. For now, Do is still in private beta but will be opening up to larger audience over next few weeks, and will eventually open to the public in late November.
“A lot of people have referred to [Do.com] as a social productivity app,” Whiteley goes on, “but really it’s the set of things that you need to manage task lists – it can be your own task lists, or ones you share with a group of others. You can organize small or big projects, at home or with life or at work. Plus there’s some utilities such as easily taking notes and having them on all your devices – the basic sets of things you need to get work done with other people.”
Here’s some screenshots:
