Today before its Dreamforce event Salesforce.com issued an announcement containing a sprawling set of updates, including new Chatter features, the company’s plans for Data.com (the domain name Salesforce.com bought for at least $1.5 million.

From Salesforce.com’s announcement:

• Chatter Now: Chatter Now will deliver real-time collaboration by enabling users to see when their colleagues are online, instantly chat with them in context and share their screen without leaving Chatter.
• Chatter Customer Groups: For the first time, Chatter users will be able to invite people outside of their organization into their Chatter network to collaborate. Chatter users can invite customers and partners to collaborate in private, secure groups, which will extend enterprise collaboration beyond the four walls of a company.
• Chatter Approvals: With Chatter Approvals, users will be able to take action on any approval process from directly within their Chatter feed. Sales discounts, hiring decisions, vacation requests and more can all be approved without having to leave Chatter. Approval processes will now have context, including comments and documents, to help increase productivity and help users make informed decisions.
• Chatter Service: Salesforce Service Cloud is creating the ultimate self-service destination for the social enterprise with Chatter Service. With Chatter Service, customers will be able to ask their question once in a familiar social feed, and have the answer come to them in an instant — whether it’s from the knowledge base, the community of experts or a service agent. Chatter Service will also connect to public social networks, such as Facebook, extending the community far beyond the boundaries of a traditional self-service portal. Customers have gone social and the Service Cloud, with Chatter Service, is the way that companies can create a social, self-service community to delight their customers.
• Data.com: Launching at Dreamforce, Data.com gives sales and marketing professionals the information they need to effectively plan, target and execute sales and marketing campaigns — all within Salesforce. Data.com will unify socially-crowd sourced contact information from Jigsaw and company information from Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) in one place to help customers build and maintain social customer profiles.
• Heroku for Java: Heroku now gives more than 6 million enterprise Java developers a clear path to build social, mobile and open cloud apps. Enterprises and developers have made significant investments in Java skills. Now, those skills and investments can be applied to creating the social enterprise by developing customer and product social networks. Java joins Ruby on Rails, Clojure and Node.js as the fourth language for the Heroku platform. For more information and technical details about Java on Heroku, visit http://www.heroku.com/java
• Chatter Connect: Chatter Connect makes other applications social by extending Chatter to custom and third-party applications. The Chatter REST API makes it easy for developers to integrate Chatter into other applications, such as intranets and portals, custom mobile apps and other enterprise apps. In addition, Chatter for SharePoint allows companies to make SharePoint social — companies will be able to embed Chatter feeds in a Sharepoint MySite or TeamSite and share documents from Sharepoint to Chatter.
• Database.com is GA: Database.com, the underlying cloud database already serving the company’s 100,000+ customers, is now generally available to all enterprises. Database.com is a proven multi-tenant database, managing more than 36 billion transactions and 13 billion custom objects in the second quarter alone. It is open, massively scalable, automatically elastic and built from the ground up to power this new generation of social and mobile cloud applications.
• Database.com Data Residency Option: The new Database.com Data Residency Option will be for companies that want to take full advantage of the cloud, but have requirements, policies or perceptions that may prevent them from gaining the strategic benefits that cloud computing has to offer. With Database.com Data Residency Option, companies will have the option of keeping readable versions of sensitive data where they want, allowing them to take full use of salesforce.com’s trusted cloud computing model.

The company also announced touch.salesforce.com, HTML5 version of the site and service optimized for touchscreen devices.

I’ll be live blogging the keynote later this morning.