Perhaps the biggest reveal at the Dreamforce event is Salesforce.com’s intent to take a more consultative role in its customers strategies, ranging from cloud computing to brand monitoring to internal social software – and especially how all of those components fit together. Salesforce.com has long offered consulting and customization regarding its software-as-a-service offerings, but this sort of high level strategic consulting is new for the company.

I’m not sure this intention was explicitly stated in the keynotes, though it was certainly illustrated by the napkin drawing Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff drew for Burberry, which was seen during the keynote Wednesday. Both Peter Coffee and Benioff made this intention clear during the executive Q&A sessions following the keynotes. Both said that Salesforce.com is looking to take a more consultative role for its customers.

Also, during the keynote Benioff said in no uncertain terms that developers are the key to the company’s success. This means both keeping its customers’ development staff happy with Salesforce.com’s platforms, and attracting ISVs to Salesforce.com’s ecosystem. To quote Red Monk‘s mantra: developers are the new king makers. And Salesforce.com knows it.

Now, let’s take a look at the rest of the good, the bad and the meh of the event. You may find it helpful to review the list of announcements.

The Good

I mentioned before the event that I wanted to see Chatter integrations, and I got my wish. The Chatter REST API, Chatter Approvals and the new integrations with Concur, Infor and Workday may sound boring, but these are the sorts of core functionality that can make social software actually useful in the enterprise. I would have put this stuff under “The Meh” because it was both expected and obligatory, but I don’t want to understate the importance of moving towards a web-oriented architecture and integrating with “real” enterprise software.

We already knew about the Seesmic CRM apps and Java support for Heroku, but both of these announcements are important.

Seesmic is seen as a likely acquisition for Salesforce.com, and its Android and iPad clients for Salesforce.com are extremely slick. The Seesmic Android apps have some impressive integration into the phone’s call history and contacts system, and I think RIM, which acquired Gist, should be very worried about this.

Meanwhile, Java support for Heroku is a big step forward for Heroku and for enterprise PaaS. The Scala support is probably more important for Scala, as it will help drive experimentation with and adoption of this language.

The Bad

Comparing affects of social media and mobile devices on corporations to the Arab Spring was a ham-fisted comparison. On the other hand, it stuck in people’s minds and generated conversations, so from a marketing standpoint I suppose it’s working. But as a way of accurately representing reality, it misses the mark.

And although I don’t like to get caught-up in semantics, I can’t help but be bothered by the co-opting of the term “social enterprise.” Social enterprise has always referred to companies that were founded with some sort of social agenda – companies like Kiva, for instance. Benioff is using it to mean basically any company running Chatter.com. Lame.

The Meh

Database.com and Siteforce hitting GA and Jigsaw getting renamed Data.com were yawn-worthy announcements, despite the promise of Database.com and Siteforce technology. Siteforce is the slickest CMS I’ve seen. But we saw the demos last year, and it’s hard to get excited about this sort of stuff.

Chatter Customer Groups and Chatter Now are good additional functionality, but were expected. The external collaboration aspect is obligatory at this point. The universal communications stuff, almost certainly based on DimDim, is more interesting and confirms the trend that Sameer Patel of the Sovos Group and Ray Wang from Constellation Research have been talking about. But again, this sort of functionality is expected in a collaboration product at this point.