14 DAY TRIAL // The social web is slowly entering the enterprise software and services market and companies are rushing to include ‘social’ features in their products, or launch completely new but complementary ones. Salesforce.com is well known for its sales and customer relations products, but is now launching Chatter, a social networking tool for enterprises. It’s not exactly the first company to do so, but, then again, it’s not the first company to incorrectly claim to be the first either.
"Salesforce Chatter is the most exciting thing I've worked on in my career," Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com, said. "Delivering Chatter is a seminal moment and one that marks the arrival of Cloud 2." Cloud 2 is a term coined by Salesforce to encompass social tools, mobile and real-time apps.
Salesforce Chatter is a cloud-based social network for a company’s employees. The users can create work groups and keep up with the members of their teams. They will also be able to set up professional profiles and even post status updates regarding a project they’re working on or any info that others may find useful.
“Leveraging the social features popularized by Facebook, Google and Twitter, like profiles, status updates and real-time feeds, Chatter empowers enterprises with a new level of productivity only possible in the cloud. Chatter's s social collaboration technology enables enterprises to collaborate around more than just documents, employees can also follow people, business processes and application data,” the official announcement read.
Salesforce Chatter has been in beta for the past four months and the company says it has proven a huge success. It claims that 90 percent of the beta testers would recommend Chatter to others and that the tool has resulted in a 22-percent increase in productivity for the users. The productivity numbers sound a bit stretchy, but it would be as hard to dispute them as it may be to prove them.