Chatter, Yammer Free Social Collaboration

Salesforce.com Chatter Free and Yammer's Basic editions offer free, in-the-cloud collaboration tools for organizations that want to use social networking tools in a private, secure setting.

Microblogging in the enterprise attempts to harness the power of Twitter and Facebook-like activity streams of social networking in a private, secure business setting. Quick hitting "what am I doing now" comments mingle with files and followers in a fast flowing river of information. The emerging question for IT managers is can social collaboration tools solve business problems and provide access to your organization's resources while containing implementation costs?

The newly minted Chatter Free offering from Salesforce.com fits neatly with that company's CRM and development platform by making no-cost, social collaboration available for anyone with a corporate e-mail account. The Yammer client was updated in late 2010 and integrates social tools with corporate functions including organization charts and leaderboard reports of popular topics and users.

Below, I review both enterprise social networking tools. Any organization already using Salesforce.com services already has Chatter in the platform. There is a $15 per-month, per-user Chatter Plus client to fully collaborate within the Salesforce.com universe. Chatter Free is a nice extension of the social collaboration for organizations that want the ability to collaborate and follow people, documents and files but don't need the full, licensed sales or service features found in the licensed editions of Salesforce.com. Chatter Free is also available at Chatter.com for no-cost use by organizations that don't use other Salesforce.com products.

I also look at veteran social collaboration maker Yammer, which was significantly enhanced in version 2.0. The no-cost Yammer Basic can be used by organizations that want to try out collaboration. Yammer Premium adds additional administrative, integration and branding features for $5 per-month, per-user. Yammer Basic provides a platform where users can create profiles, share files and collaborate on events. The Yammer tools have a simple, clean interface that makes it easy for users to navigate and find shared information in the organization.   

Chatter

Chatter Free from Salesforce.com is a new entry in the social media market to the extent that the service offering is now available without buying a Salesforce.com license for one of the company's other product editions. Thus, Chatter enters the enterprise social media fray with the experience gained from deployments at Salesforce.com customer sites. Chatter became available on Dec. 7 and is available at no cost for users with a corporate e-mail account.

To begin using Chatter, users go to the product Website and complete a simple registration process using their corporate e-mail address. A link necessary to complete registration is sent to the corporate e-mail account thus ensuring that only users who have a working corporate e-mail gain access to the otherwise private social collaboration tools provided by Chatter.com.

During tests, I accessed Chatter through the Web interface and by downloading the no-cost Chatter desktop application for Windows and on an iPad. Chatter mobile is also supported on BlackBerry devices. I would like to see Salesforce.com release a Chatter mobile client for Android phones, a noticeably absent capability that is found in nearly every competitive platform. I would also like Salesforce.com to anticipate that Windows Phone 7 will need a mobile Chatter client as well.

As with nearly all no-cost competitors, there is a certain wild-west feeling to the user onboarding process. Users sign up on their own by going to Chatter.com or by responding to an invitation delivered through the corporate e-mail system. I recommend that organizations that decide to implement Chatter launch a formal adoption campaign that includes a "rules of the road" and formal e-mail invitation campaign to get adoption off to a good start. Chatter does come with a series of short instructional videos that will help users both understand how to use the product while showing some good use cases for participating in a social activity stream.  

The default landing page is a Chatter-branded Web interface, which is where I spent most of my testing time. I also downloaded the Chatter Desktop onto a Windows 7 system. The Chatter Desktop resembles an IM client with an activity stream running down a narrow window on the desktop. Tabs at the top of the Chatter window let me see the whole Chatter stream, chats directed at me alone, other co-workers who were signed up to use Chatter and groups. No other application problems were reported on tests run from the iPad or various Windows and Linux systems running the most current operating systems and browsers.

Chatter administration falls to moderators. The first user to register an account using a corporate e-mail address becomes the Chatter moderator, a role that can be easily shared or relinquished to another. Moderators can activate or deactivate other Chatter users, promote or demote another Chatter user as a moderator and delete posts and comments.

Chatting and working with other test users was quite easy. I was able to share very large (more than 20 MB) files by uploading them to a secure online repository. Chatting looks and feels the same as in Facebook. I could also share links and images. Files that Chatter recognized, including images, Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, were displayed in a thumbnail in the activity stream. Like the Chatter feature in Salesforce.com's paid editions, I was able to "follow" documents and files just as I would a person so that I could see developments or changes in a project.