Salesforce's Do.com Social Task Management Hits Private Beta

rumors over what Do.com is and what it actually does

Salesforce.com is in the process of notifying select users of the private beta via e-mail. CRN received an e-mail invite late Friday after signing up for notification on the Do.com web site in September.

According to the main Do.com page, "Do is the social productivity app for your team. Do makes it easy to get work done with anyone, from anywhere you are."

Sean Whiteley, Salesforce senior vice president, said DO is a "social productivity app," but more simply it's "an app to work on things with other people."

Whiteley said Do is aimed at "prosumers," meaning it can be used for personal and work tasks.

"We're finding as many people use it in the workplace as in their home life," he said, adding that people keep track of things that need to get done whether that's picking up milk or doing team performance reviews.

The social task management play lets users create tasks for themselves and the rest of their team. Do.com lets users create, assign and work on tasks through its web interface, via e-mail and in its iOS app for the iPhone and iPad.

Do also integrates with Google Apps, Gmail and Salesforce.com, so tasks can be created directly from those apps. More integrations are on the horizon and Do has an API to enable more, Whiteley said. A Google Android app and a Dropbox integration are also in the hopper.

Do presents information in a Facebook-style feed to enable users to manage and update tasks. Users receive real-time updates when new tasks are added or when they've been pulled into a project. Users can accept, reject, comment or perform other functions.

Do.com is based on Salesforce's acquisition of Manymoon, a cloud project management and collaboration service that Salesforce acquired in February. Whiteley said it was written in HTML5 on Salesforce's Heroku platform.

"We took [Manymoon's] vision and put more horsepower behind it," he said.

Currently Do is free and Salesforce is bringing users into Do in groups of 1,000, and each user gets five invitations. Whiteley said it will open it up wider in the next few weeks. Whiteley said Do will eventually become a pay service, but that is roughly a year away.

"The idea is you put everything in Do and organize it in there and you won't forget to do it once it's in there," he said.

While targeted at both consumers and business users, Do.com's launch continues Salesforce's push for social capabilities. At Dreamforce 2011, the company unveiled its vision of the social enterprise, a business that leverages social, cloud and mobile technologies. Salesforce also continues to innovate around its Chatter platform, a business-focused social network.