Salesforce Chatter Spells the Death of the Intranet

Today we rolled out the Salesforce Chatter collaboration tool across our organization as we are heavy users of the Salesforce (aka Salesforce.com) tool and want to take advantage of it’s social media and collaboration features. Chatter has blended intranet functionality, document sharing, internal collaboration and communication, with a Twitter like functionality that is easy to use and follow, and so far, we love it.

Our firm has roughly 25 full time employees and every employee is a Salesforce user. We tie in other applications into Salesforce for time tracking and project management and are trying to use Salesforce Mobile on our iPhones and iPads. In total we pay $20,000-$25,000 USD a year in license fees for these tools which are the main tools that we use to manage the relationships behind our business. These tools of course integrate with standard office tools and programs like Outlook, Word and Excel as well as Adobe products that interact with PDF documents. We plan to do further integration with more tools in the future and we can’t wait for better MailChimp functionality.

Screenshot of Salesforce Chatter Feed

Anyway, I wanted to give you a bit of background on who we are and how we use Salesforce before launching into my review of Chatter and my first impressions, this being the first day that we have use it. This morning, I received an email allowing us to use Chatter under our current Salesforce agreement. As one of the owners of the company, I quickly set-up an account and uploaded a profile picture and then invited the whole company to connect with me. This was at approximately 9:20am this morning. To my surprise, by 12 noon today, more than half of our company had joined Chatter and set-up their own profiles and by 3pm, almost everybody who was in the office today is set-up. It’s a very good sign that our team likes what they see thus far and see the value in this type of collaboration tool.

So far, people have been able to update their profile information and follow each other’s feeds. Documents are already being shared and initial questions and complaints have been addressed, answered and fixed quickly. One negative is that I have not figured out how to integrate Chatter with social media tools like Twitter and Facebook but according to their website this type of integration is available if not it’s coming soon.

We are considering setting a policy to make the Salesforce login screen the home page on everybody’s browsers so that they are encouraged to login to Salesforce and start communication using it’s tools rather than how it’s happened in the past which has been by email and/or instant messenger. Email has been ok, but its difficult to colloborate via email and instant messenging apps breed forgetable conversations.
Perhaps this is where Salesforce will have the greatest success by being able to provide a viable place to track internal communication and relate it back directly to the clients account. We have tried this type of communication an tracking in the past with various forms of intranets and internal wikis with limited success due to the limited functionality and client integration. The intranets and wikis have died slow painful deaths over time and the last collaboartion tool that we tried to use, Yammer, barely got off the ground before it crashed and burned. In Yammer’s defense I don’t think we gave it enough of a shot, but it was not as easy to use and intuitive as Salesforce Chatter and failed to capture and hold the collective attention span of our organization.

Chatter seems to have found a solution to what I imagine have been common problems for organizations like ours and I have to give it two thumbs up. I will provide a more detailed review of Salesforce Chatter at a later date once we have used it for at least a couple of weeks.

Does Salesforce Chatter spell the death of the intranet? Maybe for some organizations but as previously stated our intranet and wiki are already dead so Chatter is likely the birth of a newer better method of communication. Paired with newer mobile technology like the iPad, it could become a killer app.

Comments, question and discussion are welcome below!