Adobe Systems and Salesforce.com have announced the availability of Adobe Flex Toolkit for Apex, a new set of programming tools using Adobe Flex to create new business applications for the Salesforce.com Apex platform.

I wrote about another Adobe platform named 'Apollo' several months ago in an article that attempts to identify the trends of "rich vs reach" applications and the desire to strike a balance between the two.

Salesforce users that live in the Salesforce app for more than 3 hours per day (as we often do), will be likely early adopters of Flex-based apps, if they prove to make people more productive. Salesforce envisions developers inserting Flex apps into existing page layouts, but a more grand approach will be to replicate many Salesforce functions in a desktop app that also works offline.

YouTube owes its success, in large part, to their Flash video player specially developed for their videos. When used effectively, the combination of traditional web pages and Adobe Flash/Flex can have tremendous adoption results.

For end customers, Flex apps can deliver rich product catalogs, configurators, online order forms, engines engines, and interactive forums.