Salesforce.com yesterday released its much anticipated social networking platform for the enterprise – “Chatter”. Touted to be the ‘Facebook for the Enterprise’ and the ‘Beginning of Cloud 2 Era’, Chatter is believed by many analysts to be the next big game changer in social networking, albeit from an enterprise perspective. Will Salesforce.com Chatter live up to all the media hype and attention? What’s so special about it? Let’s find out.

What is Chatter?

Dubbed as the “Real-time Collaboration Cloud”, Chatter’s essence is to provide secure and instant real-time information in a Facebook like UI. It is built atop the robust & secure force.com infrastructure.

Chatter lets you follow co-workers, collaborate on business documents and simultaneously update important pieces of data. To put it in layman terms, Chatter is a SaaS version of Facebook where your friends are replaced with your co-workers. Further, it works as a feed which can be easily integrated in third party applications like CRM suites and Business Intelligence tools. It offers a tight integration of social collaboration, business processes and workflow management – all abstracted in one cloud-based offering.

As part of beta release, Chatter was offered to a select group of 100 companies. Based on the encouraging response, the group beta group was expanded to 5000 Salesforce customers. With its official launch at the recent Google’s CloudForce 2010 Conference, Chatter is now available to over 77,000 Salesforce customers.

Pricing & Features

Chatter is free for existing Salesforce.com customers. New companies can buy Chatter subscriptions for their working staff and old companies can add more Chatter licenses for $15 per user per month.

Chatter is a power-packed business communication tool and it offers the following features

• Profiles
• Status updates
• People directory
• Real-time feeds
• File sharing/Content
• Groups
• Security and sharing model
• Ideas
• Contacts (read-only)
• Accounts (read-only)
• Dashboards and reports
• 1 custom app
• 10 custom objects

Ubiquitous Platform

Chatter is compatible with almost all popular platforms including Windows, Mac, iPhone, iPad and Blackberry. So, even if you don’t have a computer, you can finish critical tasks on Chatter using your Blackberry or iPhone device. An Android application for Chatter is expected to be launched later this year as well.

Is it secure?

Since Chatter works behind a firewall, it is fully secure. It’s like running your own Facebook on company’s intranet.

Leveraging the force.com Platform

If you are already using the force.com platform for business applications, Chatter is a blessing in disguise for you. It inherits its capabilities from the Force.com platform and therefore, it offers seamless integration with other force.com based applications.

Since it can interact with applications, Chatter is not just about people collaborating with each other. It could be various modules of an application or even multiple applications interacting with each other via Chatter.

Competitors

IMO, Chatter is a unique concept and has no real close competitors. I can’t think of any other business tool which bundles the concept of social networking & business collaboration as neatly as Chatter does. In terms of collaboration tools, I think it’s fair to compare Chatter with Microsoft Sharepoint and Lotus Notes.

Are you ready for Cloud 2? Let’s chatter about it!