Salesforce.com launched a social enterprise application here at Dreamforce today that will allow companies to create their own private, social networks and integrate with Twitter, Facebook and other social applications.
Dubbed Salesforce Chatter, the application serves as a secure enterprise collaboration application and social development platform.
The application models social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Salesforce.com Chatter provides the capability for customers to have profiles, feeds and groups. It will also integrate Twitter and Facebook so people may get these respective feeds into their social network environment. In addition, developers will have access to the 135,000 applications on the Force.com platform.
Some of the features with Salesforce Chatter:
Profiles: Includes contact information, area of expertise, work history and a photo. We are seeing more profile features in Enterprise 2.0 applications. Starups like CubeTree are using profiles as an anchor for customers to connect.
Status Updates: A real-time activity stream – another sign that the real-time web is becoming a standard technology in the enterprise.
Feeds: Content and applications will be part of the activity stream. For example, when an update is made to the Salesforce CRM environment, it will ping the feed to notify subscribers.
Groups: Users may create their own groups to share content and updates.
Social Content: Documents such as spreadsheets can be integrated into a user’s feed, similar to how a photo is shared on a social network like Facebook.
This has to be one of the more significant developments in how the enterprise is adopting the consumer web. It’s another sign of the pervasiveness of social networks in people’s lives.
On a broader front, this can only help the cause of Enterprise 2.0 style companies. Users benefit in terms of having another option for how they use the social web in their daily work.
