Salesforce is making headlines today with their announcement of Chatter, an enterprise collaboration platform that ties into their existing customer relationship management (CRM) product. Besides the name – Chatter is as risky a term as social in the business world – the product announcement is notable for two reasons:
- Chatter is integrated with Salesforce’s Sales and Service products. For instance, when you update an object (opportunity, contact, account) created in another part of the environment, that update will be posted to a feed that others can follow to keep track of progress on a deal, project, etc. Documents that appear in the feed can be previewed right from the feed, saving the hassle of downloading lots of files to find the right content. The missing piece here, though, is wiki functionality so that content can be directly stored and edited, as opposed to uploading files.
- Salesforce opted to develop Chatter in-house vs. acquiring a smaller vendor. This one is interesting because there’s been very little acquisition in the enterprise 2.0 vendor landscape, and the bigger players seem to be opting for a build vs. buy strategy. In Salesforce’s case, one obvious explanation might be the integration. If you have the resources, starting from scratch and building something that integrates well with the rest of your product line can be easier than trying to “fit” something developed externally. There’s also no substitute for the deep experience gained from directly developing something yourself.
One last thing: Salesforce’s Chatter demo video uses the same background music as Apple’s Unibody Macbook Pro video.
