NEW YORK—Salesforce.com
announced the expansion of what officials call "the next cloud computing
paradigm" with a new round of private beta testing for its Salesforce
Chatter platform, which allows Facebook-style social collaboration among
enterprise workers.
In an April 8 press conference here, the company also heralded the launch of
AppExchange 2, the next generation of its online enterprise-application
storefront, which will include a new “ChatterExchange” with Chatter-enabled
social enterprise applications built by third-party developers.
Salesforce Chatter will become available sometime in 2010, according to the
company, and be included in all paid editions of Salesforce CRM
and Force.com.
"We are in the era of Cloud 2, where social networking use has surpassed
e-mail, Facebook and YouTube use have outpaced search, and new mobile devices
like the iPad are creating entirely new ways to interact with
information," Salesforce CEO Marc
Benioff wrote in a statement issued ahead of the New York
press conference. "With today's announcement, Salesforce.com is advancing
the shift to Cloud 2, where productivity gains are going to come from real-time
collaboration available on any device. We've seen the future of enterprise
software, and it looks more like Facebook on the iPad than Yahoo on the
PC."
Salesforce has affixed the name “Cloud 2” to what it sees as the logical
evolution of the cloud, where enterprise software starts looking and acting
more like popular social networking applications such as Twitter, Facebook and
YouTube. Just as Facebook feeds its users with real-time information relevant
to their interests and social network, Salesforce’s executives suggested in an
April 7 interview with eWEEK that so too will cloud-based enterprise
applications begin to provide that same sort of granular focus, paired with the
ability to collaborate on shared business events.
The combination of Salesforce’s Service Cloud and Chatter will, in theory,
allow companies to quickly update critical knowledge articles and closely
follow high-priority customer-service cases, follow experts across their
organization, collaborate in real time over more complex cases, update service
agents of upcoming service-level agreement milestones, and share data about
recent cases.
In a demo, Chatter looks and operates very much like Facebook, with various
organization members leaving comments beneath notices about cases and
service-level agreements. Users can tweak their profiles, click on a notice to
see more detail about a particular case and follow others within their company.
If a particular case is becoming more complex than anticipated, a user can
click an “Escalate” button and bring colleagues with additional knowledge and
experience into the conversation.
AppExchange 2 will include social-enabled apps from FinancialForce.com,
Genius.com, Job Partners and others. Some 15 Force.com Labs apps available for
free through ChatterExchange on AppExchange 2 include ChatterViz, Chatter Case
Triage, Chatter Mass Follower, Chatter Timeline, Chatter Live Tag Cloud and
Chatter + Google Alerts.
Salesforce has been busily integrating all manner of social networking tools
into its cloud-based offerings. In October 2009, Benioff announced three new
features leveraging SAAS (software-as-a-service) capabilities within the cloud:
Salesforce Knowledge, which integrates an automatically upgradable,
Google-accessible knowledge base into the Salesforce.com platform; Salesforce
Answers, which allows an enterprise or SMB (small to midsize business) to create a customizable
database where they can post questions or data to their user community; and
Salesforce for Twitter, which adds Twitter into the Service Cloud to provide
real-time information.
Twitter integration allows customer-service personnel using Salesforce to click
a “Search Twitter for Service Issues” tab in the dashboard, and then view
public conversations about a product, as well as send tweets about particular
service issues.
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