Salesforce Chatter Enters Private Beta

The social networking and messaging addition to the Salesforce.com CRM and cloud services is now in use by 100 companies, bringing it that much closer to availability to all companies using the Force.com platform.Salesforce.com introduced Chatter last November, positioning it as a way for businesses to build their own Facebook- or Twitter-style communication and collaboration platform. They've now rolled it out to 100 companies for beta testing. Salesforce.com''s goals for Chatter are ambitious: the announcement of the beta boasts that Chatter "accelerates the demise of Microsoft SharePoint and IBM Lotus Notes."

Chatter lets employees create their own business-related profiles, enabling co-workers to search for who would be appropriate members of a project team. It also provides application and status updates, as well as informational feeds from colleagues, applications, and even documents. And as with Facebook links, the feed can provide direct, immediate access to relevant documents on the server.

Salesforce.com is scheduled to be publicly available this year. It will be included in paid editions of Salesforce CRM and Force.com; a new Chatter Edition will include those two products plus Salesforce Content for $50 per user per month.

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