Salesforce Chatter offers all the features you can expect from a ‘microblogging’ system: profiles, following, status updates, feeds, groups and sharing documents and links. In addition it also pulls in data from twitter, facebook so it becomes a social datamart.
A cloud based social collaboration platform is not new, even though this is offered on a tried and tested platform that many organizations trust with their sales data. And if you use Salesforce CRM you also get tight integration with accounts, contacts, opportunities, reports and dashboard.
Even more interesting is that it is architectured to be extended. I expect you should easily be able to add new functionality through the app exchange or build your own on the Force.com platform. As Salesforce puts it: “With the new Chatter social platform, social features and capabilities will be available for any application built and run on the platform”. I’d love to see it built out to more than just microblogging, for example with blogs, wiki’s and workflows.
The product was announce mid november 2009, it is scheduled to become generally available in calendar year 2010. Salesforce Chatter will be included in all paid editions of Salesforce CRM and Force.com.
A new Chatter Edition will be sold for $50 per user per month. Even though this will also include Salesforce Content and Force.com this is a surprisingly high cost. Especially since many microblogging tools are offered much cheaper or even for free.
But for existing Salesforce CRM customers this is an amazing offering. And Salesforce joining this application space is an interesting development.
Microblogging is often referred to as Twitter for Corporations as there are many similarities and they are undoubtedly inspired by Twitter. This type of tool is good to share ideas, questions, answers and status updates. They are also good for communication, knowledge sharing and finding expertise. Most of them are aimed for use between co-workers but some others your company’s community of customers, partners and others on the Internet.
It is all based around short messages, although generally not the 140 characters we know from Twitter. You can follow people or tags and keywords. In a web browser, through desktop applications, smartphone clients or optimized mobile websites. You can generally create private or public groups so you can start conversations and share knowledge in groups. Share links, files, photo’s and videos, often supported by a bookmarklet that makes sharing quick and easy.
Communote is a typical microblogging solution designed for the enterprise with all the standard features you like sharing messages, hyperlinks and files. It does not seem to have any features to make it stand out.
Hashwork helps you connect and share Twitter-style with your co-workers and your company’s community of customers, partners and others on the internet. Hashwork shares your tweets with your company’s community, and lets you attach files, images, and more text to your posts on Twitter.
Present.ly is a typical microblogging solution with all the standard features. What stands out is their Twitter compatible API, which allows you to use tool built for Twitter to access the system, and its native support for iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Windows Mobile.
Sharetronix is the Open Source version of Blogtronix, a multimedia microblogging platform. It helps people in a community, company, or group to exchange short messages over the Web. The licensed version has more features.
Socialcast offers all the standard features and in addition allows you to flag messages for follow up, a google gadget so you can follow the stream from you gmail and a suite of analytics that provides measurable insight into the people, connections, and information-sharing occurring in your Socialcast community.
Socialtext signals does not offer a lot of feature information on the website and it seems rather stale. However if you use Socialtext’s enterprise collaboration platform the choice for Socialtext Signals may be a no-brainer due to its native integration. Otherwise there are better options.
StatusNet is the open source micro messaging platform that helps you share and connect in real-time within your own domain. With StatusNet you can encourage collaboration, build and engage your community, and be in command of your brand.
Yammer is a standard microblogging site with little extra features. You can attach a file to your message which is displayed nicely as thumbnail and can be viewed without downloading. The main distinctive feature is an organization chart.
Yoolinkpro is a mix between social networking and bookmarking and focussed around sharing web content rather than microblogging itself. It is still placed in this category as the functionality is very similar. It stands out through it’s modern user interface.
Wordpress with P2 theme, which transforms the popular blogging platform into a microblog platform. It is completely different from the other options but and to the nature of the platform it can be tailored to your needs.
With regard to the last option there are many more. If you want full flexibility you can also find microblogging modules for popular open source CMS systems like Drupal and Joomla.
