Salesforce.com Brings Facebook to Work With Chatter.com

Salesforce.com has announced plans to officially release Chatter.com early 2011. Chatter.com is known in the industry as a “Facebook for Work”. Salesforce.com has a segment of their service called the “Collaboration Cloud”. Within this cloud is where chatter.com will sit. From salesforce.com’s website, they like to describe chatter.com as , “a new world of real-time enterprise collaboration software-as-a-service. It’s a world where collaborating at work is as easy as using Facebook. It’s where you stay on top of what’s happening in your company with real-time updates on people and groups, important documents, and your top deals and accounts. You can also discover new experts and insights that will make your job easier. All of it fueling smarter and faster business decisions.”

The goal with Chatter.com is to keep up with everything that’s happening in your company with real-time feeds very similar to how Facebook works in your personal life. Let’s take a deeper look at the features of Chatter.com:

• Profiles – Get to know your colleagues and share important information in the Collaboration Cloud. Discover peers and experts to expand your network and work more productively. Establish yourself as an expert in the areas where you have knowledge to share.
• Status updates – Keep your colleagues up to date on what you’re doing. Share insights, prevent duplication of effort, and reduce unproductive email traffic.
• Groups – Work more productively in teams to get things done quickly. Share information, work together on documents, and collaborate on business-critical projects—all in the Collaboration Cloud.
• Document sharing – Work collaboratively on documents and easily find them again months or years later, all from a secure browser, right in the Collaboration Cloud.
• App updates – Make all your salesforce.com applications smarter and more proactive. Your salesforce.com application records come to life when they can automatically alert you to updates and changes, right in your real-time feed.
• Feeds – Monitor the people, groups, documents, and application data that are most important to you—it’s all pushed to you in real time in the Collaboration Cloud.
• Security and sharing – Keep the right people in the know and keep sensitive information private. Security is not a concern in the Collaboration Cloud.
• Social – Bring insights from Facebook and Twitter into your Collaboration Cloud, so you can monitor all of your communities from your unified, real-time feed.
• AppExchange – Add Collaboration Cloud features to your Force.com applications or build brand-new apps that include Chatter. Then add them to the AppExchange, salesforce.com’s popular marketplace of cloud computing. Now featuring ChatterExchange, where you can find collaboration software-as-a-service apps for your business.

The debate is whether or not Salesforce.com can beat out Yammer which has a similar feature set and has recently gained momentum with additional funding and new clients. Dell is one of the first company’s to use Chatter and  they currently have over 100,000 users within the system.

Chatter.com is free for everyone to try. From there, Chatter.com users can upgrade to Chatter pro, the traditional service that costs $15 per user per month. They can also upgrade to Salesforce’s other customer relationship management (CRM) software products. There are also Chatter apps on the iPhone, iPad and Blackberry. The Android version is coming in first quarter 2011 and the site should come out of beta in February of 2011.

Are you motivated to use chatter within your company as the communication platform? Leave us your thoughts in the comments section.

About the Author
I am a developing social and digital media junkie on an adventure through life. Right now I am on the chapter in the book where I live in Los Angeles. Reach me on twitter @ahr19. Thanks for reading my post.
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