Salesforce launches ChatterExchange, aims at Lotus Notes and Sharepoint

When Google Apps Marketplace launched, we noticed that Google's partner Salesforce hadn't joined this ecosystem. Now it's clear why. Salesforce is building its own ecosystem of collaborative applications around Chatter. Although Chatter (Facebook for enterprise) is nothing like Google Apps (email + docs), however the aim of both tools is the same - collaboration. At the ChatterExchange presentation, Marc Benioff has clearly stated that Chatter will compete with MS Sharepoint and IBM Lotus Notes (he modestly omitted Google Apps). "Don't be confused that these systems have little in common" - said Benioff, - "the fact that Sharepoint and Lotus Notes were created back in these days when people didn't use Twitter and Facebook and when the top collaborative technologies were email and shared folders".



Chatter is an enterprise social network, based on a microblogs, profiles and groups. In Chatter, you can send private and public messages (with files and other content), discuss issues in real time, subscribe to employee and group feeds. Besides, in Chatter not only users can send messages, but also external sites (like Twitter or Facebook), and other enterprise applications (or objects in these applications). For example, you can subscribe to customer updates (the new orders, bills, support requests) or on messages from the ERP system (for example, new orders higher than $10000).

What is ChatterExchange? In fact, it's just a marketing action. It's just a new section in the AppExchange ecosystem. All the applications in this section are able to "chat" via Chatter.

Now Chatter is still at the private beta. 500 Salesforce customers are using it. Later this year Chatter will become available to all Salesforce 72,500 customers for free.

See also: Top 10 Enterprise Portals