Chatter News & Articles

Though Salesforce.com's (news, site) enterprise collaboration platform, Chatter,  just hit the market in June, the CRM company is already back with a look into version two-dot-oh. Unsurprisingly, Chatter 2 features even more social goodness than its predecessor, including the ability to "follow" files, dashboard updates, etc.

Greetings, children of E2.0. This week we kicked off our information management agility affair with a nice little overview. Meanwhile, both SharePoint and CRM were given new doorways into mobility. 

Today Salesforce.com (news, site) announced that all of the magic of Chatter, their Facebook-like platform for the enterprise, is going mobile. 

As one of Facebook's biggest fanboys, we bet Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com's CEO, threw a party when everyone's favorite social network decided to become a customer of the CRM specialists. 

Could the direction we've been so sure of for the last handful of years be leading us down a path of distraction and dysfunction? That's what the latest word on the street is. Social computing and collaboration aren't paying any mind to the negative criticism, however, as new solutions continue to arrive by the virtual truckload. This week's additions to the pool include Salesforce's Chatter, Social CRM news, and upgrades to the sharing capabilities in Google Docs.

After roughly half a year of waiting and squirming and teasing and such, Salesforce (news, site) has finally taken Chatter, a collaboration platform commonly referred to as "Facebook for the enterprise," out of beta. 

"We are trying our very best to open a door," began Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com's (news, site) CEO, at this morning's announcement about the expansion of Chatter. The application, baked into the Salesforce.com platform, socializes the cloud by allowing not only users, but documents, third-party applications and top customers to be followed in a Twitter/Facebook-like fashion.  

The desperation with which corporations are trying to throw together Facebook-like solutions for their internal teams is certainly astonishing, but is it wise? Most of you would probably assume so, but Larry Dignan of ZDNet, SmartPlanet and TechRepublic is so against the idea that he compares Facebook for the corporate world to crap. Literally.  

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

Everyone said that the Interwoven/Autonomy deal would only be the first in a series of big announcements within the enterprise content management world. And that it is.

Today, Canadian-based enterprise content management vendor Open Text (news, site) has reached a deal to buy Vignette Corporation (news, site) for US$ 310 million.

Vignette is expected to become a wholly owned subsidiary of Open Text. The deal will see Vignette stockholders get US$ 8 per share plus 0.1447 of Open Text stock.

The deal is expected to close the second half of this year. The news saw Open Text shares fall by 85 cents. Vignette's shares however soared US$ 3.32 -- a sign that shareholders see this as good news for the struggling enterprise content management firm.

"Vignette's customers represent some of the world's most powerful online brands and we are excited about the opportunity to expand the relationship with these customers and partners," Open Text Chief Executive John Shackleton said in a statement.

We are waiting on more details. When we get them, we'll be sure to pass them on.