Salesforce.com Chatter – Yet another platform for Enterprise Social Networking

Today, Marc Benioff , Salesforce.com’s CEO, unveiled Salesforce.com’s Enterprise Social Networking platform. The platform supports employee profiles, status updates from people, a conduit for applications to write updates to either a group or a person’s stream and an API which can be used to extend these capabilities beyond what’s already provided.  Although, Salesforce.com is touting this to be one of their biggest offering in years, the current offering only offers a rudimentary framework.   The current Chatter offering is very one dimensional, say compared to Cisco’s offering (read about it here), and provides capabilities that are very text based. This is definitely not an all encompassing enterprise level social collaboration platform, but does it need to be?

Salesforce.com is what it is today, because they provided a means for the developer community to develop and extend Salesforce.com’s offering. This is most likely their strategy for the new Chatter platform as well. From that perspective, Chatter would do well. It provides an extensible and secure API to feed in updates into the various channel. One interesting possibility is to integrate CoTweet like functionality into Salesforce.com and manage twitter chatter that way.

See Salesforce.com’s video describing Chatter:

In the video, one possibility that Salesforce.com talks about is getting in feeds from various backend systems, like SAP, Peoplesoft, etc. Although this sounds interesting, and is useful for smaller players, it would be unthinkable for larger companies to implement both from a security and volume perspective.

Photo by na.presseportal on Flickr

Related posts:

1. Cisco’s Foray into Enterprise Social Networking