If you want to give the Ideas Product a try, the best place to start is to Sign up for the Ideas Free Trial. In less than a minute you can sign-up for your fully configured account, complete with demo data, Ideas in Action, and the Ideas Dashboards. 

The Limited Release for Ideas Public Sites is now open for all companies who are interested in taking part. Contact your account executive if you are interested in participating.

You can extend Salesforce Ideas beyond private sites and make your community visible to
everyone. Doing so broadens the impact of your community and lets search engines such as Google index user-generated content. You can also syndicate content from your community, making it easy for users to stay up to date via news feeds.

The new sites technology includes a couple features that are critical to high volume public websites. In addition to the advancements in UI customization, we have also added seamless self-registration and custom URLs.

Download Salesforce Ideas Data Sheet (PDF)

The Winter '09 release is now live for all 47,700 Salesforce Customers! As many of you may have seen Salesforce announced a bunch of exciting new features across all the product lines. For the Ideas product it is a particularly big release with over a dozen new feature. Below you'll find detailed descriptions of each feature as well as a screenshot tour of the Ideas App. 

With the Spring '09 release customers have the option of using Visualforce to achieve pixel-level control over the ideas application so that you can match the exact look and feel of your website, whether that be an intranet site or a public customer facing website. 

The way it works is that you'll download a default set of Visualforce pages and corresponding Apex Classes which make up the Ideas App. In total there are 20+ Visualforce pages and associated Apex Classes:

Popular Ideas, Recent Ideas, Top All-Time, Recent Comments, Ideas Detail Page, My Activity, My Ideas, My Votes, Recent Replies, Search, Login Pages, Registration Pages, Error Pages...

These are pages that you could build from scratch using Visualforce and Apex but we wanted to help make it easier to get started.

Once you've installed these pages you can then go in and edit the mark-up and CSS to configure the site just the way you like it. Because you have control of the mark-up and CSS, you can move elements around on the page, remove elements all-together, or insert entirely new elements. For example you might want to extend the profile page with fields from the user object or you might want to add a button for report abuse. You might even decide to create entirely new Visualforce page, such as top contributors or about this site.