If you work in a midsize business that has a sales team of any size, chances are that Salesforce software is deployed somewhere on your servers. And as ZDNet's Sam Diaz writes, the venerable application is undergoing a paradigm shift that is reflective of the way we live and interact now.
It's been only three months since Salesforce made its Facebook-like collaboration tool Chatter available and now that tool is getting its first big upgrade. Diaz writes:
Salesforce makes no secret of the fact that Chatter is pretty much growing out of the molds of Facebook and Twitter, complete with a news feed, profiles and "following" capabilities. But the company is also enhancing it to meet the changing collaboration and communications needs of businesses.
Through Chatter, employees can follow a document or file, meaning that they'll receive an update every time someone makes a change to that file. That's a valuable time and resource saver over having to e-mail an attachment with an updated document to everyone on the project who might need access.
What else? Diaz takes notes of other social networking-style features such as:
- Filters: You can filter the feed by groups, people and records they follow fir quick access.
- Topics: Twitter-style hashtags and the ability to follow the posts and comments related to a particular topic.
- Recommendations: Algorithms smart enough to make recommendations about colleagues to follow or groups to join, based on common connections such as management hierarchy.
Make sure you get up to speed on this "real-time collaboration cloud." It's amazing how quickly and how thoroughly social networking interfaces are infiltrating workplace tools.
--Don Willmott