» Chatter

Chatter-vantage #1 – No Need to Rush the Stage

Posted on November 16, 2010 by Jeff Grosse in Chatter, Dreamforce | 6 Comments

This is the first in a series of brief posts to highlight the advantages Chatter is bringing to the Dreamforce 10 conference. In summer 2010, Salesforce.com opened up an attendee portal for their Dreamforce event to connect customers to each other as well as Salesforce employees and partners.

Chatter-vantage #1 – No Need to Rush the Stage

When you attend a session, you’ll often find yourself wanting to ask additional questions of the speaker or want to exchange contact information with them so you can connect after the conference. What typically happens is that you stand in line to talk to that person, you’re watching the clock to ensure you get to the next session on time, and then when you finally get to them, they’ve run out of business cards. You may never connect with them again.

With Chatter in the Dreamforce attendee portal, you can connect to speakers before, during, and after the conference. Ask questions ahead of time to help speakers tailor their content to what the audience wants. Introduce yourself to them ahead of time or even send them a thank you after the session.

No matter what, you’ve got an advantage no other conference you’ve ever attended has had. Chatter makes the conference experience better and more meaningful because you can readily connect with speakers and get to your next session without worry.

How to Prevent Your Accounts and Contacts From Aging Like Fish

Posted on September 1, 2010 by Jeff Grosse in Analytics, AppExchange, Chatter, Integration, Sales | 7 Comments

Some things get better with age. Some great examples of this are wine, cheese, and a well made violin. Other things don’t age so gracefully, like a salmon sitting on your kitchen counter…for a month. Over time, without proper maintenance, your Accounts and Contacts within Salesforce are going to stink, much like that fish.

People move from one company to another constantly. Their title may be Director of IT today and tomorrow it’s VP of IT. These changes are challenging to keep up with. Who do you go to for this information? Many of the lists you purchase for prospecting are already getting stale but to even find out how good the data is, you have to do all the work.

What if Account and Contact updates were fed to you? What if a simple dot of red or green next to each Account and Contact told you how up to date your data is? What if changes to YOUR Accounts and Contacts were proactively pushed into your Chatter feed? That’s what you get with the new Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM.

You may know Jigsaw as the website where you can go to get the contact information of 22 million people at more than 4 million companies. Now you can get everything in Jigsaw natively within Salesforce.

Every time you look at an Account; every time you look at a Contact, you know if the data you’re looking at is current. Red tells you there’s an update available. Green tells you you’re in sync with Jigsaw.

Now updates to your Accounts and Contacts just roll into Chatter in realtime. You know when updated data is available. You can quickly click right on in, compare what’s in Salesforce and what’s in Jigsaw, accept any changes and save the record.

How clean is your data today? I’m not talking just the rudimentary, “Does it have a phone number or does it have an email address?” kind of questions. Is your data current? Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM comes with built-in analytics to evaluate what you have today and recommend changes. On top of that, could you possibly see a shorter sales cycle and a higher win rate if you had current data? Jigsaw helps you evaluate that with analytics.

Good data in Salesforce means each phone call or email happens right away because your sales team doesn’t have to go out and research such basic information. And how much more effective will they be when they proactively approach their prospect and ask them about that recent promotion? That personal touch makes them look “in the know” about who they work with.

Pricing for Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM starts at $29 per month per user and is available today. Check out the images below. You can learn more at http://enterprise.jigsaw.com and be sure to follow @Jigsaw on Twitter.

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The Day the Earth was Chatterized

Posted on June 22, 2010 by Jeff Grosse in Chatter, News, Productivity, Social Networking, Tools | 12 Comments

Can you think of a significant day in the history of software? I’m looking for a day that a single company changed the way millions of people do business and made them more productive. I’m guessing there have been a few; but honestly none of them quickly come to mind. From this point forward though, June 22, 2010 ought to stick in your mind as “The Day the Earth was Chatterized. “

Salesforce Chatter is a collaboration platform for business that’s as intuitive to use as Facebook, more contextual than email, more alive than SharePoint, and runs on a secure, private, and trusted infrastructure already delivering billions of transactions each week.

From the first public mention of the word “Chatter” by Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, to the day it went live for 77,300+ customers, only 216 days passed. And in just 125 days, the Chatter private beta went from 100 to more than 5,000 customers. During the beta, more than 100,000 people used Chatter, and polled recently, 90% of them would recommend Chatter to others. Words like “amazing”, “crazy cool”, “fantastic”, and “monstrous win” are how users describe the Chatter experience. That’s impressive for a feature that can be enabled and deployed in under one minute, with just five clicks of the mouse, with nothing to install; no hardware, no software.

The Veil on Salesforce Data Lifted
While Chatter and Salesforce CRM data are both available to everyone with a Salesforce license today, Salesforce revealed a new version of Chatter licensing which helps extend Chatter and even basic Salesforce data to all enterprise employees at a significantly reduced price. This Chatter-only license offers

Profiles
Status Updates
Real Time Feeds
Content and File Sharing
Groups
Ideas
Read Only Access to Accounts and Contacts
Limited Access to the Force.com Enterprise Cloud Computing Platform

Priced at $15 per user, per month, Chatter-only users will be able to utilize corporate data like Accounts and Contacts which have previously been completely off-limits without a full-Salesforce license. Additionally, each Chatter-only user is allocated up to 600 MB of storage space for Chatter content sharing while Enterprise and Unlimited Edition users get a storage bump from 500 MB per user to 1 GB. Professional Edition users get 600 MB of content storage.

Not that long ago, a single add-on license for Salesforce Content was $35 per user per month. Now all Salesforce users get Content included in their licensing and Chatter-only users get tremendously more than just Content was, and at less than half that original price.

While Chatter, file, and content collaboration is a great reason to get these new Chatter-only licenses, I can imagine a fair number of them will also be sold for the sheer fact that it allows read-only access to to Accounts and Contacts, some of the key data in any company.

Additionally, organizations will be able to share one custom application from the Force.com platform with their Chatter-only users.

As if adding Chatter to every Salesforce org wasn’t exciting enough, Salesforce also revealed that there are 30 new ChatterExchange apps available today to bring the Chatter add-on ecosystem to 60 apps. While every one of 160,000 customer designed apps are also Chatterized, these new ChatterExchange apps extend the usefulness of Chatter beyond what even Salesforce imagined. The thing I really like about the ChatterExchange is that this ecosystem is only beginning. Developer preview only began 99 days ago and already we see apps to Chatter when conference room lights are turned on, save and rate Chatter, auto-refresh group and individual status updates, bring in outside collaborators through Google Wave, map out where service reps are and reassign them on-the-fly, Chatter analytics and tons more. Considering Dreamforce 10 is still 23 weeks away, we’re going to see some fantastic new Chatter add-ons before the big show.

For information on getting started with Chatter, visit the new Getting Started page at Salesforce. There you’ll find easy to use resources like:

Admin activation guide
Sample email template for rolling out Chatter
Interactive user training
Use cases for Chatter
Customer case studies
FAQs
Customer testimonials
Customer survey results

Chatter customers really say it best.

Chatter Takes a Starring Role with Cloud 2 and the New ChatterExchange

Posted on April 8, 2010 by Jeff Grosse in Chatter, News | 8 Comments

The future of business applications is upon us. It’s a world where your data comes alive, those who log into your applications are people, not just users, your team’s past work is leveraged into future solutions and even proactively fed to those who need it, and you truly collaborate with not just your direct coworkers, but people from across the company in a way never before possible. This world is Cloud 2 and it’s not imaginary; it’s the reality that 100+ companies, 3,800+ developers, and Salesforce themselves have been experiencing for the past two months. What makes this future possible is Chatter. It’s the game changer that is quickly becoming the best thing Salesforce has ever developed and will be available to all paid editions of Salesforce sometime this year.

What makes Chatter revolutionary though? Aren’t business apps working just fine the way they are today in small and large organizations alike? Isn’t email collaboration enough? Aren’t portals and knowledge management systems and content repositories and legacy, home-grown apps cutting it? The fundamental ingredient those systems lack is context. On their own, they accomplish something important, but they tend to live in their own disconnected worlds. Though integration appliances and services exist, most companies never get to the point of tying it all together. What those applications lack is connecting people together with their ever-changing data, in the midst of their spreadsheets, documents, and collateral, with one tool as a hub for business. That hub is Cloud 2 and whether you use Customer Relationship Management out-of-the-box from Salesforce or you want to create an application that’s the farthest thing from CRM, Cloud 2 is the platform for it all, and the star of the show is Chatter.

So for the quick purpose of definition, what is Chatter? Chatter is a social layer to business applications that fosters effortless collaboration to get your daily work done. It’s built on a secure, trusted, reliable framework that 72,500+ companies are already using today to run their business. Chatter does not require a server, or software, or even some additional licensing from Salesforce. When it’s ready for release, it will be provisioned immediately to all Salesforce customers for rollout when they’re ready.

A new breed of AppExchange

With the introduction of Cloud 2 comes AppExchange 2 and a new section, the ChatterExchange. Introduced today are 20 Chatter applications built by Salesforce partners like Appirio, Echosign, FinancialForce.com, Genius.com, ServiceMax, and more. These new apps leverage the power of Chatter’s social layer, using profiles, status updates, and real time feeds to extend their apps directly in front of business users, right in the context of their work. Add to that 15+ more Force.com Labs apps created by the developer community and this amounts to a fantastic start to a new realm of business collaboration. Not only will Chatter be utilized with core CRM functionality, but the ChatterExchange will extend it beyond what many of us even imagine today. Check out the screenshots and video below for some idea of these new ChatterExchange apps and watch the live Cloudforce 2 presentation on April 8 for live demos.

The emphasis on service

You may recall that in 2009, Salesforce put a big emphasis on the fastest growing segment of their business, Service and Support. With the release of Service Cloud 2, we saw how companies could now monitor their brand via Twitter within Salesforce, look to the wisdom of crowds with a solution like Answers, and build public and private knowledgebases that bring solutions to consumers where they tend to look first, the Internet.

Today, Salesforce is expanding the private beta of Chatter from 100 to 500 customers, of which 250 use Service Cloud 2. Early indications from the first beta customers have been overwhelmingly positive in regards to not only the ease of Chatter’s use, but also in improving overall communications and collaboration.

So what will Chatter do to push the Service Cloud envelope? Picture this. A service rep is having trouble reproducing a problem reported by their customer. In the past, escalating that case only notified the rep’s manager so they would help assign more resources to the issue. With Chatter, that escalation can automatically add the product manager, a technical lead, two subject matter experts, and the rep’s manager as followers of the case and notify them with what’s going on. They’re given a link directly back into the case and they begin resolving it with full visibility to what’s going on within that case via the Chatter feed. Soon the issue is resolved and instead of a slew of emails being typed and sent manually, outside of the context of that case, now everyone is kept in the loop with Chatter. It’s automated, it’s in context, it involved the right people.

I worked in support for an enterprise software company for nine years and I can only imagine how a tool like Chatter could have cut down on our call times, increased quality answers in our knowledgebase, gotten the right people involved with cases early on, eliminated email runaround, and bottom line, led to happier customers and a more profitable bottom line.

To learn more about Cloud 2, be sure to watch the Cloudforce 2 event live from New York City on April 8, at 10 AM EST. The event is free and will be offered as a recorded session later as well. If you write your thoughts about Cloud 2 on Twitter, be sure to use the hashtag #cloud2.

Appirio PSA with Chatter

Chatterbox by FinancialForce.com

ServiceMax for Chatter

Salesforce Chatter Goes Private Beta for 100 Customers

Posted on February 17, 2010 by Jeff Grosse in Chatter, News | 35 Comments

Amid all the hoopla around Google Buzz, Salesforce is making some buzz themselves in the Enterprise space with the announcement of a Chatter private beta to 100 customers today.

When Salesforce began looking for customers to start kicking the tires on Chatter, the response was overwhelming. More than 2,500 companies enthusiastically volunteered for the beta. From that, 100 were chosen across many industries including financial services, manufacturing, high tech, and professional services.

So what really is Chatter? Well, if you’re one of the 400 million people who have joined Facebook already, you already have a little familiarity with what it’s about. Chatter is streams of information, files, comments, photos, snippets, videos, data, and intelligence, fed to you directly in context of where you already work. Chatter takes the work out of finding this information and instead puts it in front of you, knowing what you need to know about and letting you customize and filter your feeds to be most relevant.

Chatter is the culmination of numerous business functions that we can all benefit from. It’s part content management system, part team report card, part data field history viewer, part chat client, part message board, part workflow notifier, and part get-to-know-the-people-you-work-with social network. It makes data come alive, whether that’s letting you know an important deal just closed, a new product catalog was published, a competitor just had a bad earnings call, your co-worker needs help with their presentation, or one of your customers is late in paying an invoice to you. Chatter brings all that together in one place so you can make better decisions, help others on your team, and easily publish news with just a few clicks

Much of the information you’ll get in Chatter is timely and important, so Salesforce needed to find a way to provide you that information even when you don’t have your browser open with Salesforce. That’s why along with Chatter, they’re introducing a new Chatter client for the desktop that is built on Adobe Air. Much the same way TweetDeck provides you background popups with relevant tweets you decide you want to know about, Chatter will provide you that immediate feedback on your computer, regardless of what application you’re running and what’s in the foreground. Since this Chatter client runs on Adobe Air, it works on both Mac and PC using the same code.

When you’re away from the desktop, you don’t have to miss out on Chatter there either. Chatter will include dedicated iPhone and BlackBerry apps right out of the chute. No more hauling out the laptop to see what your team has been doing to move deals forward. Information is served to you in real time. No waiting for an email that a deal closed, just follow it on Chatter and you’ll know.

Among the biggest benefits of Chatter is the fact that it’s built on a solid, secure infrastructure that you don’t need to worry about. Just know it’s there, it’s secure, it’s scalable, and it’s out of sight. You won’t pay for a server upgrade, you won’t patch a database, you won’t buy a firewall, you won’t add a hard drive, you won’t have to do load balancing, you won’t have to tweak a kernel, you just go about your work and leave the rest to Salesforce. And because Chatter is just an extension of the applications you’ve already setup, all the data security that’s already in place just works, out of the box for Chatter.

It’s almost like Chatter is putting a human side on CRM. Today, we converse in the halls, in meetings, on the phone, and through email, but we don’t exchange more than limited amounts of data about ourselves, the projects we’re working on, the deals we’re closing, or the scoop we learned. We occasionally share information using Salesforce itself, but we rarely see the data come to life. Chatter brings the insights to you. Even the fact that all users of Salesforce will have a profile page which can contain a photo, bio, stream of what they’re doing, the groups they are members of, the documents they update, and the people who they follow tells immensely more than just passing in the hall or during a meeting.

As Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce pointed out back in November, with Facebook, I can know what movie my friends have been gone to, but I don’t have just as easy access to what deals that same person is moving forward in my pipeline. It doesn’t have to be that way. Chatter will offer prescribed and subscribed content to keep you in-the-know about anything in Salesforce.

I can see it now. Chatter streams will eventually become the topic of conversation throughout the halls of companies around the globe. Have you noticed how often Facebook and Twitter are mentioned in the news, television shows, and even in the lunch room? When people begin seeing the value of sharing, collaborating, informing, assisting, building, and broadcasting, in context, it will change the way we work.

The private beta is a great sign of progress and getting Chatter ready for prime-time. Remember, Salesforce unveiled the concept of Chatter only three months ago at Dreamforce 09. It’s anticipated that Chatter will be available for all Salesforce customers during 2010. While it’s an aggressive timeline to go from 100 customers on Chatter to nearly 70,000 by the end of 2010, that go-live will be a pivotal moment in enterprise computing. It will set the standard by which other collaboration tools will be judged. And while it will be a new concept for it’s users, it’s also going to feel like something they already know. There won’t have to be a day-long class to teach users how to use Chatter. It will come quite naturally, and when it does, watch what will happen in companies; as their data comes alive, reps are enabled, managers are informed, and the company hub becomes Salesforce and Chatter.

To learn more about Chatter, attend the live Chatter event today (February 17) at 12 PM PST.