Chatter 2, Facebook, Social Networking and Content Collaboration

One of the reasons why I like Chatter 2 is that no training is required. 

No training means no costs and no downtime from employees.

Unlike complex CRM and ERP implementations (and I know, I’ve been there), everyone knows how to use Facebook.  Okay, well not everyone.

But it’s the same look and feel. 

Consider these stats with Facebook:

More than 500 million active users

50% of active users log on to Facebook in any given day

There are more than 150 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices

People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active on Facebook than non-mobile users

We are moving away from the desktop computing to mobile devices and tablet computing.  Keyboards will soon be like a floppy disk (what’s a floppy disk you say?)

The touch screen IS the keyboard.

But the real key is the content collaboration.

The Sharepoint Killer?

While Facebook is aimed primarily for photos and videos, Chatter is aimed at documents, spreadsheets and presentations.  Corporate data.  Plus videos, of course. 

I’ve always hated getting an attachment in an email.  Why?  Other than email clutter, the other problem is version control.

To me, Chatter may be the Microsoft Sharepoint killer.  I really can’t share the number of Sharepoint implementation success stories, because most of them are not happy stories.  Performance and user adoption were the 2 biggest factors.  To increase performance, you ended up buying more hardware, both on the server end and networking end.  Marc Benioff would have a seizure if he saw all the “boxes” being ordered.

Like Facebook

Three powerful interfaces of Facebook-like interfaces are Chatter Recommendations, Chatter Desktop, Chatter Filters.

With Chatter Recommendations, employees receive automatic suggestions of colleagues to follow and groups to join just like Facebook.

Chatter Desktop allows employees to post updates, comments, files and links without opening a web browser, and displays pop-up alerts to instantly notify employees of important updates.

Chatter Filters is the left sidebar of Facebook:  a filter of Chatter Feed by groups, people and records. Chatter Topics lets users associate their updates with other posts and comments on the same topic by using a hash tag. 

Hash tags (#) are Twitter like features.

Mobile Support

In the days of desktops, you had to support 3 browsers: IE, Firefox and Safari.  Now with mobile computing you have a wealth of devices and OSes to choose from.  Everything from iPads, iPhones, Blackberries, and now the popular Dell Streak with the Android OS.

The era of real time mobile computing is already here.

About 25% of Salesforce’s 80,000 customers use Chatter, and it is free for all paying user subscriptions of Salesforce CRM and Force.com.  Non Salesforce users costs $15 per user per month.  Chatter 2 features will be available in October.