CrownPeak announced on January 16 that the company's Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) CMS now supports Google's Open Social, Google Gadgets and other content published for inclusion on social networking sites. 

The sofware allows content creators to create, customize and then deploy rich Internet applications from CrownPeak CMS, ready fo inclusion in business and consumer social networking applications such as Salesforce.com, Ning, orkut, Facebook, and MySpace. The SaaS includes "dozens" applications which can be put together and published by CrownPeak customers.

"We're excited to be working with our customers on the convergence of social networking and web content management," said Jim Howard, CEO of CrownPeak, in a prepared statement. "Our enterprise integration capabilities have separated us from the competition for some time. Extending these integrations into mashup-style applications offers great opportunities for our smaller and medium sized business customers to offer powerful communication methods very inexpensively."

Google's Open Social standard has wide backling among social networking and Web 2.0 service providers,  including LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.penSocial. "All of these new applications and integrations are the perfect complement to software delivered as a service," said CrownPeak CEO Jim Howard. "Our goal has always been to help our customers manage their content easily and successfully. By supporting these standards, and integrations into these increasingly popular social networking tools -- our customers are better enabled to transform their online content strategy and, in turn, achieve business success."