Salesforce.com on Thursday announced a private beta program for an enterprise collaboration platform. Dubbed Salesforce Chatter, 100 companies around the world are testing the platform that offers anywhere, anytime access to Chatter’s real-time feeds via BlackBerry or iPhone smartphones.
Chatter aims to help companies understand everything going on in their organization and avoid missing critical information. Chatter is taking direct aim at legacy software such as SharePoint and Lotus Notes with a design that looks and feels like popular consumer social-networking sites.
In fact, Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com, boldly declared that Chatter marks the end of legacy collaboration software like Microsoft SharePoint and IBM Lotus Notes. “Consumer Internet services like Facebook and Twitter have shown us better ways to collaborate,” he said.
Plenty of Promise
Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, said Chatter represents an area with plenty of promise. “The different ways different vendors have been trying to leverage social-networking trends in business environments is interesting,” King said. “IBM was the first company to start supporting different types of inter-organizational social networking. The ability to get your arms around information coming from disparate sources is a valuable concept.”
Chatter offers profiles, status updates, feeds, application updates, document sharing, and more. Employees can create business profiles and use status updates to automatically keep colleagues informed with alerts that prevent duplicative efforts, and share files and links.
Real-time feeds let employees keep track of information with personalized updates from people, applications and documents. A feature called Application Updates makes sure all relevant status updates from a customer’s Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, or custom Force.com application are available. The apps can even flag time-sensitive developments, like new sales opportunities or customer contact changes.
An End to Legacy Programs?
Chatter also features document sharing that avoids e-mail in-boxes and file servers for instant delivery, as well…