There’s still no word on when or if Microsoft‘s enterprise microblogging product OfficeTalk will ship, but Sonoma Partners is already bringing microblogging to Microsoft Dynamics with its Vibe product. And today Sonoma launched a free community edition. The community version is a fully featured version of Vibe for free, but Sonoma isn’t offering any support for it.
Sonoma is an official Microsoft partner that was hired to write documentation for Microsoft Dynamics.
According to the announcement on MSDN:
We believe in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM community, and therefore we want to offer Vibe to the community an alternative to Salesforce.com‘s Chatter. Because we’re not offering support — think of Vibe as a public beta — we can afford to give it away, so download Vibe, use it, and enjoy it on us. We firmly believe social networking is a critical way for businesses to communicate, and we want to support that philosophy by spreading Vibe far and wide.
Vibe features include:
- Posts important CRM data — but also allows users to manually post information to a feed.
- Lets users create and maintain their own feed subscriptions.
- Has native integration to Gravatar so users can personalize an avatar for their feed.
- Allows users to search across all feeds.
- Supports hash tags in posts.
- Includes a usage analytics dashboard.
- Works with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 on-premise editions.
In addition to Chatter, Vibe competes with Qontext. Qontext offers enterprise collaboration and microblogging for Netsuite, Salesforce.com and SugarCRM.
As Chatter, Vibe and Yammer offer microblogging features for free, it becomes clear that certain features are becoming increasingly commoditized. Watch for real differentiators, such as integration and support, to be increasingly important.
