Salesforce.com Chatter – Will it be the Facebook for the enterprise?

Back in November 2009 at Dreamforce, Salesforce.com’s annual cloud computing event CEO Marc Benioff announced Salesforce.com Chatter, which would allow companies to collaborate in real time within a private social network.

Later in December 2009 I got to see it with my own eyes at Cloudforce London during the 2-hour keynote presentation by Marc.    Within 3 months of this announcement it is already in private beta and expected to be available to all 70,000 customers during 2010.

So what is Salesforce Chatter?  Chatter is a unified system to collaborate with the people you work with, apps you work in and content you work on.  It takes the best parts of Facebook and Twitter with profiles, status updates along with ability to follow people and records providing you with a personalised news feed.  Chatter also lets you attach files like presentation you have been working on and link for a website or article. This becomes very powerful in a sales or service environment where Chatter will bring all that information together in one place and enable you to make better decisions.

Chatter is available in the browser like Salesforce.com but also expecting to see a presence on the desktop with an Adobe Air client and on the iPhone and BlackBerry as applications like Salesforce.com mobile.

Will it be the Facebook for the enterprise?   For companies using Salesforce.com across the organisation I think it is a must have and provides the enterprise privacy you can’t get on Facebook or Twitter and the clean integration with your customer records you can’t get with stand alone applications like Yammer.

(Screenshot of Salesforce.com Chatter on my Dev Org)

Some of the challenges I think we will see Chatter face in 2010 is adoption particularly within large global enterprises with only certain regions or division using Salesforce.com.   This may be a Salesforce.com strategy to grow its footprint in the organisation outside the Sales or Service division.

As Chatter develops over time I would be keen to see the ability to link Salesforce.com orgs together with Chatter, this could be really powerful where business have partnership and alliances with each other and need a secure and private way to collaborate.  It would also be great to see presence and voice on Chatter, showing you when your colleagues are available and initiating conference calls with them  and maybe customers is well.