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Salesforce introduces social networking tools


By Alex Handy
November 18, 2009 — 
Facebook has had an influence on Salesforce. In San Francisco this morning, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff spoke at his company's annual Dreamforce conference, where he introduced Chatter, a social network built in the likeness of Facebook, but designed for enterprise use.

While some enterprises have already woken up to the power of social networks using tools like Facebook, Ning or Twitter, Salesforce's Chatter is unusual in that it’s an offering specifically designed to facilitate business communications.

“Why do I know more about strangers on Facebook than my own employees?” asked Benioff. He then demonstrated Chatter's abilities, which appear similar to those found on Facebook and other social networking sites. Chatter allows employees to make profiles, update their status, join groups and build social applications.

Benioff pointed out that many modern enterprise employees already live in the world of Facebook and Twitter, and thus, he said, it was logical to present enterprise applications in these familiar contexts.

The Chatter social network builds on the Salesforce platform by enabling existing applications to be connected into the new social dynamics. Chatter includes APIs for pushing and pulling data from the system’s databases, and the company is also showing off tools for integration Chatter with Facebook, Google App Engine and Twitter.

Those integrations can be sued to scour Twitter for tweets made about a company’s products, for example. Chatter can also pull in RSS feeds, and groups of employees can be fed information from these feeds. Additionally, existing Salesforce applications can be associated with Chatter profiles to allow employees to be associated with the tools they most often use.

Cloud++
Benioff also introduced Service Cloud 2, a new set of capabilities for the Salesforce customer-service platform. Companies seeking to support their customers over the phone can now store their own knowledge bases within the Salesforce cloud. Integrations with Google and Twitter allow let those service workers to track down external support information online from within the Salesforce portal.

Benioff described his difficulties in pairing his Bluetooth headset with his BlackBerry smartphone. Benioff said he turned to Google for help rather than calling BlackBerry. He said his answer was found in an online tutorial video made by other BlackBerry owners. That’s the type of knowledge that Service Cloud 2 hopes to tap, he said.

Salesforce's other clouds, as Benioff referred to them, are its Sales Cloud and Custom Cloud. The Sales Cloud was also given the designation of Sales Cloud 2 to denote new features for salespeople, as well as new APIs, connectors for Chatter, and more integrations of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

The Custom Cloud 2, which consists of the portions of Salesforce's SaaS offerings that are programmable by the user, was also updated. These sites are hosted on Force.com and are built with the company's own Apex programming language.

At Dreamforce, the normally subscription-driven Force.com was supplemented by a new free service offering. Developers interested in building applications within the Force.com cloud can now do so for free, provided they have less than 100 users and 250,000 views a month.

The Custom Cloud 2 update added new features to that hosting service. Salesforce.com now offers a load-balancing API for spreading work across multiple instances of an application. The system can also now run scheduled processes.


Related Search Term(s): Salesforce


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