Salesforce has just acquired Koral, a Web 2.0 content collaboration startup which was launched only last autumn. With this Salesforce gets a shot in the arm for their foray into the content management arena. No financial details were available.

Bruce Francis, vice president of corporate strategy at Salesforce.com said "Starting today, we are a content management player."

Later this year, Salesforce.com will release two products designed to help people manage so-called unstructured data such as office documents and multimedia files.

One of the new products, Salesforce ContentExchange, is an extension to existing applications which lets users view and manage documents, e-mail messages, audio, and video. The content system uses tools common on consumer Web sites, such as tags for categorizing information, recommendations and subscriptions all managed by an Ajax user interface.

Salesforce.com also intends to release the content management and collaboration software as a standalone service called Apex Content.

This will provide underlying services, such as search and document versioning, to software developers who want to create hosted applications on Apex Content.

Both Apex Content and Salesforce ContentExchange are based on technology the company acquired with its purchase of Koral. Koral was a nine-person start-up based in California.