Salesforce.com’s annual cloud computing event is underway, and we will be live-blogging the news as the day progresses (or you can “watch” it unfold here). Salesforce has enjoyed a good couple of months–they reported strong Q3 earnings, and launched an update of Service Cloud, their fastest growing product. It’ll be interesting to see what happens today, and what direction the company will take.
CEO Marc Benioff has long praised the real-time cloud and social media streams, and today Salesforce announced its “Facebook for enterprise”: Salesforce Chatter. Chatter will provide companies with real-time collaboration capabilities in a secure, pritvate social network for their busniess. Connections are leveraged through the profiles, feeds and groups that can be created for content, people, and applications, and Chatter also touts status updates and Twitter–the most relevant tweets are filtered into the Chatter platform.
Example of a profile on Chatter--it does look a lot like Facebook!
The above photo shows the profile-page setup within Salesforce Chatter. The stock photo is of a user’s profile, but keep in mind that products and applications can have their own profiles, and join the conversation through status changes as well. Users can also post content, documents, spreadsheets, and presentations to Chatter’s newsfeed, and there is a multi-tenant sharing model. In addition, native applications built on Force.com can stream updates to Salesforce Chatter. And naturally, Chatter will support mobile devices, and will be available on BlackBerry, Windows Mobile phones, and the iPhone. It will be available in 2010, and included in all paid editions of Salesforce CRM and Force.com; it will be offered independently for $50 per user per month.
During Benioff’s keynote, he acknowledged 4 clouds: Sales Cloud 2, Service Cloud 2, and Custom Cloud 2, and the fourth was unnamed, and is presumed to be Chatter.
[Photo courtesy of ytimg.]
