SF.com's Chatter gets tongues wagging at test roll-out

Salesforce.com has launched its Chatter enterprise collaboration to 100 beta customers as part of a private test roll-out.

The Cloud sales force automation firm is positioning Chatter as an alternative to Microsoft SharePoint and IBM Lotus Notes. Chatter provides a range of collaboration capabilities including user profiles, status updates, real-time feeds, document sharing, updates from other applications and links to other social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.

Participants in the beta programme include Reed Exhibitions, Schumacher Group, and TransUnion, all of whom were chosen as existing Salesforce.com customers. "Salesforce Chatter is the killer app we've been waiting for," said Dominic Shine, group chief information officer for Reed Exhibitions, adding that with Salesforce Chatter, the company can empower employees with real-time collaboration to know it now and be more productive.

"We are on the precipice of a move from Cloud 1 to Cloud 2. Cloud used to be all about speed and ease of access. Cloud 2 is different," said Salesforce.com CEM Marc Benioff. "We will re-engineer new types of productivity and collaboration software. Consumers are already trained in it and they are going to demand it."

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