Salesforce Chatter: Business Collaboration App and Development Platform

By Geoff Spick | Published Nov 19, 2009

Salesforce's Chatter (news, site) adds social features and collaboration for the enterprise.

Executive Chat Hits Salesforce

At the cloud computing Dreamforce conference currently under way in San Francisco, Salesforce.com has announced the launch of its Enterprise 2.0 suite, Chatter. Offering secure enterprise socializing with links to the wild world of Facebook, Twitter and others, it also offers a collection of collaboration tools to help teams work smarter.

Users can create their profile, provide a tweet-like stream of their activities, join groups and share documents, leave messages and converse about business. The basics are covered in this mouthy little video.

Its like a Rolling Stones corporate video

A Development Platform Too

In addition to being an application ready to go, Chatter is also a platform that enables developers to build their own social applications. The platform includes a bundle of APIs for things like feeds, profile, updates and more. Social and collaborative applications can be created that live on Force.com or somewhere else.

Saleforce Platform

Security At Any Price?

Chatter will come free for existing Salesforce CRM users or is charged at US$ 50 per user, coming with Force.com and Salesforce Content, which seems pretty steep considering the already available free alternatives. But if an enterprise is already in the Salesforce club, the integration with their existing products and not having to rely on the vagaries of third-party cloud infrastructure will be welcome.

For the user, Chatter makes it easy to find out about colleagues in the company, track down people with required skills and keep up with project events, read alerts generated by other Force.com applications and view messages from outside the company all on the same page.

Chatter On The Go

Also available on mobile platforms, including iPhone and Blackberry, Chatter should be available at some point during 2010. You can sign up for advance information here.

For the business user, being able to preview presentations and documents live online and discuss their content will be of great benefit, but at first glance, for all the hype behind it, you are left wondering "Is that it?" Perhaps more will come when developers create their own social apps based around it.