Cutting back on pointless chat in Chatter

Chatter Messenger will be "enabled by default in organisations that have Chatter enabled," including those with Chatter Plus accounts as well as the Chatter Free edition. It will provide presence capabilities and users can chat with up to 10 people at once – as long you’re not using Internet Explorer 7. Salesforce.com is none to0 keen on IE and recommends a move to Firefox. 

And for those who dislike having conversations interspersed with emoticons, there’s good news: there will only a very limited number of these open for use in the first iteration. 

In addition Chatter Screensharing will enable employees to share screens and presentations and launch meetings instantly with their colleagues. 

"Salesforce Chatter is the engine of the social enterprise, unleashing the power of employee engagement, innovation, and productivity for companies," said Kendall Collins, senior vice president and general manager of Salesforce Chatter.  "Chatter Messenger and Screensharing deliver Skype-like real-time technologies directly in the Salesforce Chatter feed, empowering companies to run their entire business on one trusted platform."

Chatter Messenger will be generally available in June and will be free for all Salesforce customers, including Chatter.com customers. Chatter Screensharing will be available as a limited pilot in the third quarter of this year.

Analyst firm Nucleus Research welcomed the additions to Chatter in a new research note to clients:  “With this update, companies are likely to gain a greater productivity boost from Chatter because unlike e-mail or even Chatter where users have to wait for a response, integrated instant messenger enables them to see who in their company is online and engage them in conversation – even if they don’t know the person.”

It adds: “Based on Salesforce.com’s January 2011 DimDim acquisition, real-time collaboration capabilities are an important addition to Chatter, particularly for younger entrants to the work force that are used to being able to rapidly identify friends and colleagues even if they work in different locations.”

Nucleus sees particular benefit coming from the Recommendations and Trending Topics element of the upgraded Chatter offering. Recommendations can recommend groups and individuals a user should stop following based on their changing role or activities. This helps people to filter down the number of Chatter and Messenger interactions to only the most critical ones to their work. 

The research firm concludes: “Nucleus has found that often one of the biggest challenges for companies adopting Chatter is helping users to identify the right number of groups or people to follow: following the wrong groups or people defeats the purpose of Chatter; following too many produces information overload…Nucleus expects that Salesforce.com will continue to develop features and capabilities that help users to filter and manage their Chatter and Messenger interactions so they maximize the benefits of social collaboration while minimizing the downsides.”