The long-anticipated Winter '08 release is just around the corner!  Winter '08 is our 24th generation release and comes with some pretty exciting announcements. First, we've renamed our platform to Force.com to represent all of the new advancements we've made, the most exciting of which is Visualforce, our new user-interface as a service! In addition to the new platform features, we'll also release two brand new applications: Salesforce Content and Salesforce Ideas. Finally, we have (of course) made many exciting enhancements to all of our CRM applications. 

Those of you who attended Dreamforce have already seen an impressive preview of all the new features we've delivered since the summer release in August -- but for a closer look, be sure to check out the Feature Detail Pages.

In the mean time, here are the top features I'd like to highlight in the Winter '08 release:

• Visualforce: Visualforce lets you create any application, with any user interface, for any device, all running on demand on salesforce.com's servers.  This new functionality is incredibly powerful for all the developers and partners who want to build exciting new applications.  And for end users, it means that there are endless possibilities now for more customized applications that look and work exactly as you want them to.  And since these new applications are being built on the Force.com platform, they will integrate with your existing Salesforce applications and come with all the benefits of our multi-tenant infrastructure.
• Tagging and Inline Editing : Both of these two web 2.0 features leverage the force.com platform and make all your Salesforce applications even easier to use -- which means you'll see increases in adoption, data quality, and productivity.
• Content: One of the newest additions to the Salesforce suite of applications, Salesforce Content helps you share and manage documents, presentations, multi-media files and other business content by harnessing popular Web 2.0 functionality like tagging, rating, subscriptions and full-text search. No more calling and emailing around the office looking for the latest presentation -- Salesforce Content will place those important documents right at your fingertips.
• Ideas: Another brand-new application, Salesforce Ideas helps you get connected to your communities by providing an interactive, online community delivered as a service.  As with every Salesforce application, there's no software or hardware to manage.  Great ideas can come from anywhere, and Salesforce Ideas lets your communities post and vote on ideas so that the best ideas get bubbled to the top.  Start collecting innovative ideas, holding discussions and watching the best ideas from your communities shape your business. 
• Campaign Hierarchies: Marketers often employ multiple tactics to generate demand for a particular product or program--SEM, Direct Mail, Events, etc--with Campaign Hierarchies, you can easily associate these tactical campaigns to a parent campaign, up to five levels deep, and see roll-up performance metrics. This feature gets my vote for most exciting--for us marketers here at salesforce.com, it's been nothing less than life-changing.
• Salesforce to Salesforce: Collaborating with your partners reaches new heights with Salesforce to Salesforce. If your partners also use Salesforce, you can now directly and securely exchange data such as leads, opportunities, and custom objects through Salesforce.  Improve efficiency and be assured that your data--and your partner's data--is always up to date.

Winter '08 is one of our biggest releases yet and delivers way more features than I can cover here.  Be sure to check out the Admin Preview for an overview of all the great new functionality you've come to expect from our releases.  Be sure to keep checking this blog for more resources, including the release schedule, the Winter '08 Video tour and the Release notes.  Finally, our pre-release program is now available so sign up to try out the new features in your own test environment.