We be Chatting (or is it Chattering?)

So we may have just turned on what will finally be really useful social media in the workplace.


Thursday evening we turned on SalesForce.com's new "Chatter" collaboration tool. Maybe I should say pre-new, as we were able to convince the nice folks at SFDC to turn on the beta in our production environment. I didn't want to make too big of a production of it, after all, this is supposed to be social media for the enterprise, if the users like it, they'll figure out how to make it go. It is pretty simple, even dinosaurs like myself were chatting in no time.

We did make a simple announcement so folks were not wondering what this new thing at the top of the page was, and we gave them links to the intro videos. Other than that, we just turned it loose. I have been watching closely, and there does seem to be considerable activity considering it is so new. We had a few folks asking for something like this, and there appears to have been some pent up demand. I did figure the youngsters would like it, as it does look an awful lot like facebook.

Of course the real magic here, that makes it light-years ahead of Yammer and the like, is that the SFDC objects (Contacts, Accounts, Opportunities, etc.) can participate in the news feeds. Even custom objects can play along. We have a custom project tracking application, and the projects where I am the executive sponsor will not chat to my newsfeed when something important on them changes. Pretty slick.

We did find a certain amount of humor in the email it sends when you follow someone; "Dan Petlon is now following you" is enough to scare anyone. That, plus a link to your SFDC profile is all it sends. We are calling it "Chatter Stalking"

Of course I already have my wish list:

• I want rules-based auto-following. for example, I automatically want to follow any new project that I am the sponsor for. The sales leads want to follow new opportunities in there territories. You get the idea.
• I want to be able to start following from my iPhone.
• I really need to be able to control the colors in the new UI theme. I like the default, but I have had a good number of complaints.
• How about a "Chatter Genius"? Punch a button and see chats similar to mine, or to those of folks I follow. I would think this would be a pretty good way to find folks with stuff to say that matters to me.

Overall, I would say we have a winner. It is early, and time will tell, but we already have a lot of engagement from the sales teams, who figured out following opportunities very quickly. They believe it will save on a lot of email.

I'll post an update as we chat on.

Our first baby steps into cloud-based application deveolpment

I attended a Salesforce.com CIO council meeting about a year ago, and came back pretty jazzed up to move some of our stuff to "the cloud". We did a pretty deep dive on what would have been the heavy hitter $-wise, and looked at moving from Exchange to Google Apps. We had a Google partner come in to discuss it. What I was hoping for was that as we brought up concerns, the partner would say "yep, we saw that at company X, and here is how we addressed it". What we got instead was, "yep, that is an issue". The bottom line was that Google Apps is just not ready to meet the needs of the power Exchange users.

Once I recovered from that blow to my cloud enthusiasm, we looked for other things to do, namely build some of our business applications on the force.com platform. I was considerably more tentative in my approach this time, but unless we tried it, how would we know if it had a place in our application landscape.

One of our challenges in taking these first steps was the cost of doing it. We have a very stable and modern in-house infrastructure. Many of the things the SFDC folks will site as to why app development is less costly on their platform do not apply to us. I have a virtualized environment, so I don't think about buying new hardware every time I need to spin up a new app. I have an established security model. Ditto for our way to approach the database. I already use an agile development methodology. I have a highly-skilled .net development team.

We still wanted to try it, and after struggling through putting a contract together with SFDC that made sense for us, we are finally dipping our toes in the force.com waters. We have two applications in production at this point. One that does very simple high-level project management, and another to manage our IT change management process.

Would I declare success? Sort of. I think I would borrow a term from our friends at Gartner and call our experience to date promising. There are limitations to the data models on the force platform. You can code your way around them, but if I have to write a lot of code, I could just do it in .net, and it would fit in with the rest of our stuff.

On the positive note, for simple stuff like the two apps I mentioned here, it is hard to beat. The change management app I built myself (and you thought VPs were useless). It took about an hour to get the basic shell and a few workflows done, and another couple of hours of tweaking once the users go hold of it. It is hard to argue with that kind of success - built by the business owner without sucking up development resources.

We have several other projects queued up; a test case/execution management app for our QA team, expense reporting, internal purchase requisitions, to name a few. So far we have just built apps for the IT department. I'll be ready to declare success when we have deployed an app (and yes, it actually has to meet a business need) to a much larger audience.