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“Why do I know more about strangers on Facebook than my own employees?” asked SalesForce.com CEO Mark Benioff last week at Dreamforce '09.

Chatter is SFDC's answer to the business need for real time communication within dispersed groups that all happens within a private, secure, company environment. With Chatter, which will become a standard feature of all editions of SFDC early next year, every company employee will be able to create a profile highlighting their areas of expertise, publish status updates of what they're working on , and view updates of not only other staff's status but also events within the CRM portion of SFDC. Users won't all have to have CRM licenses to access Chatter, including the updates related to events within the CRM part of the system, which does require a SFDC license for record access.

I can definitely see how many companies will benefit from having this sort of collaborative tool. I can recall years ago when I was doing quality control at a large international company and would often wonder who to go to for information I needed to confirm whether data I was seeing was correct or not. It would have been great to be able to search profiles for expertise and work functions. There was also the one day each month where I was buried deep in number crunching and needed people in several roles to be super available to respond promptly to critical inquiries from me during that time, while others needed to basically not ask anything of me on those days. I would have loved to have been able to just put in my status update that it was "processing day" and to have trained everyone I worked with to know what that meant and how to respond. I could go on and on about the potential I see, just as I personally find plenty of good use for Facebook and Twitter in staying coordinated with important people in my personal life and informed of significant, but not quite email worthy events in their lives.

Chatter will also be available to non-CRM users of the Force.com platform within the version that is at the $50/user/month price point. It will of course provide no insight into CRM record events, since there are no CRM objects in that edition.

Labels: CRM, social_media

In a previous article I presented several cross-object workflow solutions, with the caveat that though it was possible to create the rules in SalesForce.com, they wouldn't get triggered across the objects automatically. To solve this problem, we have created Aspira XObject, a free tool that allows System Administrators to create "Relations" between objects so that when criteria is met on one object, workflow rules get run on another as if both were just edited.

The idea of creating the tool arose when I was working on a non-profit SFDC system optimization project and the client had an elaborate set of conditions between different custom objects where internship applications moved through stages dependent on actions being tracked on several other objects, such as the service opportunity being approved, the intern being approved, forms having been received, and so on. There was a web of lookups and workflow connecting the objects, but it wasn't working effectively because you had to know the application should be in a certain stage to go edit it in order to trigger the workflow that would update the field to the correct stage. This obviously made no sense; why use workflow at all if a user needs to know it is time to change the stage?

We created a coded solution at the time that cost them thousands of dollars, and then a few weeks later they came back and said, "This is great. Now can you make it also include this fourth object?"

It was clear a coded solution that worked one object at a time was not going to really solve their problem. They needed to be able to continue developing their cross-object application progress tracking system independently without having to go back to the developer each time.

Around the same time I started participating in a conversation on Twitter where people were lamenting the lack of immediate firing of cross-object workflow. I was then confident that a solution was going to have value to enough companies for it to be worthwhile developing it as an installable app. Thus Aspira XObject on the AppExchange was born.

You can download the free version on the AppExchange if you are in Enterprise, Unlimited or the non-profit edition of SalesForce.com (must have workflow rules to use it). With the free tool you can automate any workflow that is on standard objects. If you need to automate the firing of rules on custom objects, that extended application is available for a fee that is just a fraction of what a custom coded solution would cost. Hope your company finds it useful.

Labels: CRM, Recommended_Apps