Ok….I really wasn’t planning on writing a new blog post this morning. The life of a Force.com developer is never dull. But I started out my day logging in to the Dreamforce Attendee Portal where I was invited to share my thoughts on a Dreamforce session titled “The Impact of Enterprise Social on App Dev: How Chatter Brings Your Apps to Life.” My first thought: the impact is pretty cool.
But it got me thinking about the bigger picture of the Chatter platform. I’ve used Twitter for a couple of years now, and it’s connected me with a vibrant community of people with common interests. That social network feeds me a wealth of information about the world of Salesforce: what to read, what’s being released, other companies out there, new ideas, frustrations…you name it. I NEVER would have known to deliberately search for most of that information had I not been tipped off by my community.
Salesforce.com and the Force.com platform have long offered tools to share information (dashboards, reports, email notifications, approval processes, etc). And while that information is crucial to business managers, there’s always been that next level of information beneath the data…the stuff you wouldn’t know to look for (or ask for an automated report/dashboard). The stuff where you don’t necessarily need to do anything about it. Maybe it’s just nice to know…or maybe it’s something that you want to keep your eye on….or maybe we just averted a potential crisis!
Enter Chatter. While Chatter gives employees the ability to freely share thoughts, events, concerns, and accomplishments for individual data records, it also gives developers a new business-analysis question that can shape the end-result for any custom Force.com development project: “Now your data can start the discussion too…what do you want it to tell you?”
Chatter lets you set up notifications on most data-types when specific fields change….no development needed. Using the Force.com platform, a developer can further “personify” your data by customizing what an individual record shares with its followers. For example, a budget tracking record can “chat” a quick note to let followers know that expenses just surpassed 80% …or an Opportunity may want to share that someone just entered a new Phone Call activity. I may not otherwise pick that up from looking at a dashboard, and I really don’t want an email notification for something like that. It’s just good to know. Or, I may want to follow-up by adding a comment to the discussion…the one that was created by the data itself!
So my final thought on the “Impact of Enterprise Social on Application Development?” It starts a whole new conversation.
Kevin Swiggum is an IT Consultant and owner of Radial Web Solutions in Madison, WI. As a Certified Force.com Developer and Registered Consulting Partner, Radial specializes in Salesforce.com implementation and custom development. You can find Kevin on 
[...] The challenges for enterprise social collaboration are somewhat different to the personal use of social networks. In personal life you use the tools to keep in contact with your friends and family through messaging and sharing photos of births, weddings, holidays etc. You might use the tools to keep up to date with news topics and sport scores. In the enterprise, you would be expecting to collaborate with work colleagues, suppliers, customers and follow business events such as sales orders and shipments. Such business events do not originate from people typing in messages but they originate from applications and associated business processes. It is described very well by Kevin Swiggum in his article “Your Data is Talking to You!” [...]
the valuable content you presented do help our team’s research for my company, appreaciate that.
- Lucas
Nice Chatter description as the application where “your data is talking to you”!
The Salesforce.com CRM activities and more can now be in front of a Salesforce.com user in Outlook letting him or her the possibility to examine what’s going on.
Recently, InvisibleCRM has released the Chatter provider for Outlook Social Connector. What it does is brings the data from your enterprise right into Outlook in the same way as Facebook provider brings in the updates from a social network. It’s available for free and can be used by everyone with a Salesforce.com account. More information can be found here: http://www.invisiblecrm.com/outlookchatter/.
Brilliant! To think! Having your data talk to you when something happens to it! The Leads in your database could tell you how much they need you, and your Accounts could tell you that they are hungry. Totally something that would be useful to us. I am bringing this topic up to some co-workers for sure.
Thanks for posting!