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As the Internet becomes increasingly important to businesses, some are experimenting with "software as a service" -- the collective term for a growing number of Web-based applications that are designed for corporate rather than consumer use.

It's a field that includes Salesforce.com and 37signals.com, both of which offer Web-based suites of customer relationship management and productivity tools. Salesforce.com is one of the largest players, with about 600,000 paying customers and common shares that are listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

While Web-based software has made some inroads into the corporate world, companies like Salesforce are hoping new Web 2.0-style social networking features will make what they are offering even more appealing, and give them a leg up on their larger competitors.

Such Web suites, for the most part, have focused on helping business users -- primarily sales staff -- track their contacts and potential customers, handle their records and provide marketing support. It usually involves dealing with Excel spreadsheets, customer databases, contact lists and so on.

That kind of information is what IT types call "structured" data, which means that it comes with a built-in organizational structure, whether it's from Excel or a contact management program. That makes it easy to index and search, and to create relationships between different types of data (contacts, sales reports, accounting spreadsheets, etc.).

But what about "unstructured" data? That can include everything from e-mails and simple text documents to audio and video clips, Web pages and images, all of which are an increasingly important part of what sales and marketing staff (and their managers) are supposed to be paying attention to.

Software and/or services from Salesforce and 37signals -- as well as newer entrants such as Microsoft's Sharepoint and a company called Documentum -- are fairly good at handling structured data, but they don't do as well with the unstructured kind.

That's where some see social networking tools playing a role. IBM has already dipped its toes into the pool with the Lotus Connections suite, which bundles social bookmarking, project collaboration and other Web 2.0 applications. But the Lotus suite is designed to be installed and used behind a corporate firewall.

Salesforce sees social networking as a way of helping corporate users make better use of the data they come across -- regardless of whether it's structured or unstructured -- and let them do so anywhere there's an Internet connection. The company recently launched a new service called ContentExchange designed to allows users to upload, tag and share any kind of document with their co-workers.

When it comes to consumer-oriented Web services, many people are familiar with Flickr (for sharing photos), YouTube (for sharing video) and del.icio.us (for sharing bookmarks). ContentExchange borrows some of the features that make those services popular, and tries to integrate them into the customer management tools that its users are already familiar with.

Users of Salesforce can upload documents of just about any type with a tool very similar to Flickr's uploader, which allows a user to "tag" the document with keywords (making it easier to index and search). Once they are uploaded, a user can then attach them to sales reports or other documents from their Salesforce account, and can specify who should see them, who can download or modify them, and so on.

In the same way that Web users do with blogs or other sources, Salesforce users can "subscribe" to a particular person's documents using an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed, which will alert them whenever a new document has been uploaded or when an existing document has been changed in some way. They can also see a "tag cloud" of keywords, which shows the most-often-used keywords for a group of files.

And just as Web users can with Google's news alert system, users can subscribe to an RSS feed that pulls in anything related to a particular tag or keyword, not just a specific user. After subscribing, they would get an alert whenever a document gets uploaded and tagged with that particular word.

In an attempt to make it easier for users to share their knowledge, the ContentExchange service also incorporates features that users of YouTube or Digg.com might recognize, including the ability to post a comment on a particular document or file, and the ability to "rate" that document by giving it a thumbs up or thumbs down. Other users can then see how many comments and/or ratings a file has at a glance.

Social networking features may seem foreign to some of Salesforce's customers, but the company is clearly hoping that such tools will give it a head start in the race with Microsoft and IBM to win the hearts (and wallets) of business users.

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