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Central Desktop launched a couple years ago, and since then the small company from Pasadena, California, has grown into a respected and much-discussed online collaboration system and hosted intranet service.

I recently spoke with Isaac Garcia, CEO of Central Desktop, and posted part one last week. Here's part two of that interview.

Intranet Journal: How is your deal with Salesforce.com going?

Garcia: Well, that's an interesting question. Generally speaking, I would say it's been an interesting experiment. And that's not to give any of our existing customers an illusion that we're going to change … That's not the case at all. But when we first launched it, (we said) let's see what's happening here. … We knew it wasn't, "if you build it, they will come." We knew that just by releasing something on (Salesforce.com's) AppExchange, we knew that we weren't going to just be flooded with customers. We knew that; we weren't naοve when we went in. But we also expected, though, we did expect, that there would be a little bit more momentum behind the App Exchange as a whole.

The success stories on the AppExchange, I think, are more rare. That's for a number of reasons. It's a little bit immature. It's gaining momentum now and I they're starting to come around and do some better. But I think Salesforce.com is really good at marketing something and when it comes to executing some newer ideas they stumble. But, hey, they get it right eventually.

The week of that Salesforce.com show in January there seemed to be a lot of buzz about AppExchange, but I haven't heard much about it since.

Yeah (laughs.) I mean, we make money off of it, we receive orders every week, every month on the Salesforce side of it, but I think a good way of putting it, I can't remember who's quote this is, AppExchange changes how software is deployed, but not how software is sold. Because at the end of the day you still have to pick up the phone and talk to these guys. … You would think that you would scale your business by not talking to as many customers. But the Salesforce clients, rightfully so, demand that they talk to somebody and they want to dig in a little bit more about the product.

Switching gears here a little, what do you think the future of social networking is? And what about things like video being added to intranet pages?

So -- I have to be careful how I answer this because I'll bare my soul - I'm leery about too much consumer influence in the business world. I don't believe that consumer interfaces always translate into successful business products. And, clearly, the social networking aspects of intranets, the ability to mine your own employee base, (for example) you have 1,000 employees, you're looking for someone who's an expert graphic artist on, I don't know, furniture renditions, how do you find that employee? Ideally, within your intranet, you have a profile that's posted that you can search and find that data, and you can find that user, seek him out and easily think, 'oh, I'm not outsourcing this, I have someone in my own office who can do this.'

So I think there's value there, but I don't know if there's a real community feel that employees really want. I think businesses want tools that help them make money and not necessarily just feel good. I think a lot of the social networking aspects of it have a lot of feel good components to it -- and that's important to corporate culture and all that -- but I think we need to focus as a business, and as a business industry, on how do those social networking tools within a company help you make money? At the end of the day that's what we're about, right? And I don't think there's enough emphasis on that.

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I agree, and that's being shown in studies saying that companies are really slow to adopt social networking tools.

Yeah.

I've heard things like, employees are going to start uploading their vacation videos to the intranet. And what I think of is the annoying person in the office that comes around and shows you their vacation photos when you don't really want to see them.

(Laughs.) I don't want to be empowering … I mean, if employees want to share videos of themselves, I think there's enough tools out there for them to do it.

Right. Frankly, I'm sick of YouTube and MySpace.

This is what I meant about baring my soul.

I agree with what you bared.

… The other thing too, on the social networking side is, like you asked about video -- a little sneak peek here -- we're adding a feature here in the next coming weeks that will enable users to easily share videos or media type files, flash files and thing like that, inside Central Desktop workspaces. And the driver, the impetus behind that, wasn't social networking, it was a client that said I'm running a design shop and I have some renderings that I need to share with my client, and it's a 400 MB file. I want to share in a secure, collaborative environment. And most tools don't provide that. So they were uploading onto consumer sites and sharing that with their client and they weren't comfortable doing that. So we are going to provide that here for clients, but it's entirely a business driven opportunity.

What else is coming up that you're excited about?

A lot of things we're doing at Central Desktop, it's not about adding more features any more. We're already very feature rich. What we're looking at doing now in our next release is really enhancing more of the current functionality. So what I mean by that is right now you can create an online Web database. … From there, we're going to expand that so now if you have multiple databases, you're going to be able to join those databases, or link those databases, very much like you would a SQL database. So that gets into some transactional kind of stuff. … Suddenly, you're not quite enterprise (level), but you're now approaching that.

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