Salesforce brings social networking for enterprises

SAN FRANCISCO, US: Salesforce.com, the enterprise cloud computing company, today announced the private beta program for Salesforce Chatter, an real-time enterprise collaboration application and platform.

In the private beta, customers would also be able to realize anytime, anywhere access to Chatter's real-time feeds via BlackBerry or iPhone mobile devices.

In the past, companies have struggled with the problem of understanding everything that's going on within their organization and they are constantly missing out on critical information because collaboration tools make users do all the work.

With Chatter, salesforce.com will empower companies to break free from the cost and complexity of legacy software such as SharePoint and Lotus Notes.

Chatter is easy to use and delivers relevant information to each user based on the people, documents, and apps they decide to follow. While similar to the look of popular consumer social networking sites, the platform is a trusted, secure enterprise application that allows companies to collaborate in real time through profiles, feeds and status updates, said a press release.

"The end of legacy collaboration software like Microsoft SharePoint and IBM Lotus Notes is here," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com.

He added, "Consumer Internet services like Facebook and Twitter have shown us better ways to collaborate. Using the same social features and real-time feeds popularized by these consumer services, Salesforce Chatter changes the game for collaboration in the enterprise - all without the cost and complexity of software."

The Chatter private beta will allow customers to introduce real-time collaboration within their enterprise and provide feedback to salesforce.com on the technology experience before it is generally available.

Social features include profiles, status updates, chatter feeds, application updates, document sharing, security and social sharing, social networks, AppExchange, etc.

Salesforce Chatter is currently scheduled to be generally available in calendar year 2010. It will be included in all paid editions of Salesforce CRM and Force.com .

A new Chatter Edition is expected to be available for $50 per user per month and will include Salesforce Chatter, Salesforce Content and Force.com, added the release.