A month ago on Monday 7 December I was sitting in the London version of the CloudForce2 Partner Summit, and then stricken by a virus overnight, I watched Marc Benioff livestreamed forthe 2 hours and 15 minutes of his keynote in the general customer
session on the following day. It sounds like he did a shorter,
sharper version than his reported performance at the big Dreamforce show in San Francisco where 19,000 attended. I’ve been re-acquainting myself with the Salesforce story, and considering whether my company and our Twinfield colleagues should become part of their partner ecosystem. The combination of Force.com
platform, combined with Salesforce applications, and partner
applications makes a strong story. Benioff was emphasizing companies
like FinancialForce.com and Jobpartners who have developed their applications natively
using their Cloud technology. However, the big announcement was their
new “Twitter and Facebook” style micro-blogging product and the
addition of the Chatter Cloud, alongside the Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Custom Cloud in
their presentations and messaging. I’m impressed by the
functionality and the potential, but I have some reservations, and I
can’t help feeling they’ve got the branding all wrong…… Sales –
Service – Custom – Chatter!
Like many people I’ve been suggesting for some time that micro-blogging
functionality will begin to become an integral part of collaboration
and enterprise applications in the near term. We’ve seen the major
enterprise 2.0 players add Twitter style functionality in to the
product, or at least their roadmaps. Some while back Salesforce
acquired products like Koral, which became Salesforce Content, and Crispy, which became Salesforce Ideas.
I was worried that they had disappeared without much trace, but one of
the demos in Marc’s keynote showed their service Cloud functionality
with Content and Chatter for internal collaboration, and then reaching
out externally with Twitter for Salesforce
to monitor the external stream for product mentions – impressive
stuff. You get a flavour of what Chatter functionality can do with the
video below, where people, content and applications provide Chatter
profiles, status feeds and groups. I believe this move is of real
significance, where an enterprise player like Salesforce adds real time
collaboration around business processes. Like Dennis’s ZDNet post yesterday,
I agree that enterprise 2.0 functionality begins to make sense and add
value when it can do more than ad-hoc help, and so directly support
existing processes. Other tools like ESME or Yammer
have been available and could be incorporated in to some form of
business “mashup”. But for me, the key is that that this collaboration
functionality is available within the same platform environment,
available for use by any of the standard or partner applications, and
then the Force.com is there to build out what additional process steps
that may be required to complete or track the particular task – it is
the integrated nature of business process, collaboration tools and the
development platform to extend functionality, but all working together
and properly supported by the Salesforce Cloud environment as new
releases of the individual components come on stream. For someone who
has been used to traditional software and minimising the amount of
bespoke and integration on the grounds of cost and on-going
maintenance, it is this combination of easy integration, extension AND
support that makes the difference. I sat there getting very excited by
the possibilities, and it is no surprise to me that NetSuite made a
similar announcement shortly afterwards. The other players will need
to follow this lead.
Here is that Chatter overview:
So although I think this is a great addition to the Salesforce story, I
don’t see Chatter as a particularly enterprise friendly sub-brand name,
and surely they should be talking Collaboration Cloud and not Chatter
Cloud (although I see the site has been updated so that it says
collaboration cloud under chatter now). However, I also believe this
is one of the strands that will ensure enterprise 2.0 solutions start
to come of age in 2010 and work with existing processes rather than
being a separated category of tools working alongside or asynchronously
with the a companies conventional systems and ERP.
(Cross-posted @ Business Two Zero)
Yammer may do what you’re looking for.
Teambox has not only internal per-project twitters, but also project-management features. Give it a try, and if you like it write us! We’re open for partnerships.
“Facebook for Business” or “Chatter for Students” !!
Clearly, the most adept group of users [students] will benefit from Chatter; as will the universities that seek their interest and participation through out the ‘student life cycle’. Imagine the power of Chatter for Students (and Higher Ed in general) – who can now share; classes, study groups, assignment projects, social interests, curricula, career aspirations and experiences, content, research; join common groups as members of specific Colleges, departments, upperclassmen, Freshman, Sophomores, frats, sororities…… [ADD YOURS HERE] ……. in a SECURE environment that is flexible enough for personalization; all while taking advantage of a common security and data model. And, because the interface is familiar – the learning curve is about a half a minute !!!
By the way – we can explore the implications for MOBILE and iPad and eTextbooks at another time – all available immediately when Chatter becomes generally available (http://thehigheredcloud.com).
And what about those student graduates? Now they can have a shared platform so they can stay connected to their Alma mater and each other and all those wonderful experiences they had in school. Keeping those ‘memories’ fresh, relevant and alive will insure benefits to the individuals and the institution (think Fund Raising, Career Development). Chatter for Students or Facebook for Business – call it what you want; its a wonderful tool to engage the student from application through the entire ‘student life cycle’