Companies using business applications from software-as-a-service provider Salesforce.com will now be able to extend the apps to web sites of their choice, the firm will unveil at its US Dreamforce customer and partner event in San Francisco later today.

A new offering called Force.com Sites will allow customers to build public-facing web sites, such as consumer reviews, hotel concierge services or event registration sites, and integrate them tightly with internal business customer relationship management applications.

"With Force.com Sites, customers can run their web sites in our cloud," said Marc Benioff, Salesforce chairman and chief executive.

Salesforce said that the intention of Force.com Sites is to allow customers to get their web site infrastructure up and running more quickly. The company claimed that publishing business data and applications to the web using Force.com Sites requires only a few steps to get up and running.

Customers will first need to build an application on Force.com, using its sharing models and security rules to define the data and information to be made public, and then use Visualforce to build the web site's public-facing pages.

Finally, customers will need to register a Force.com domain name and publish the site on Salesforce infrastructure.

A number of Salesforce customers and partners, such as Jobs4MyFriends, have already used Force.com Sites through an early adopter programme.

Jobs4MyFriends is a new Facebook application that allows a company to use its employees' social networks to reduce the cost of recruiting.