Salesforce apps aim for the social enterprise
Connecting state and local government leaders
Salesforce.com unveiled a vision for the social enterprise that brings together social, mobile and open cloud technologies at the company's Dreamforce 2011 user conference.
Salesforce.com has unveiled a vision for the social enterprise that brings together social, mobile and open cloud technologies.
The company, a provider of cloud-based customer relationship management applications and services, announced new and enhanced social media applications, including Chatter Now, Chatter Approvals, Chatter Customer Groups, Chatter Service and Data.com, company officials said during the Dreamforce conference held Aug. 31 in San Francisco.
The platform uses HTML5 to deliver an optimized experience on touch devices for Salesforce and native Force.com, a cloud-based application development platform, officials said. By using open-standard HTML5 technology, touch.salesforce.com will let users access salesforce.com from smart phones, tablet devices and operating systems.
Additionally, Heroku for Java, Chatter Connect and Database.com will let organizations listen to, engage with and analyze what people are saying about them and create apps where users can interact with their brand, company officials said.
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Salesforce.com is trying to keep up with a social revolution in which the number of social networking users has surpassed e-mail users. Nearly a quarter of all time spent online is spent on social networks such as Facebook. Plus, people access the Internet more from mobile devices than from desktops, officials said.
The company is trying to help organizations transform into social enterprises by offering social innovation across Salesforce’s apps and platform, which are used by many federal and state government agencies.
For instance, during the 2010 national census, Salesforce.com’s cloud-based customer relationship management system gave the Census Bureau a 360-degree view of data flowing in from its thousands of partners, intermediary organizations that helped gather statistics for the huge demographics project.
Census Bureau officials are now looking at ways to add more mobile computing capability to the cloud-based systems, as well as knowledge management and social collaboration improvements.
Some of the social innovations released in the latest Salesforce.com announcements include:
- Chatter Now will deliver real-time collaboration by enabling users to see when their colleagues are online, instantly chat with them in context and share their screen without leaving Chatter.
- Chatter Customer Groups for the first time will let Chatter users invite people outside of their organization into their Chatter network to collaborate. Chatter users can invite customers and partners to collaborate in private, secure groups.
- Chatter Approvals: With Chatter will let users take action on any approval process from directly within their Chatter feed. Sales discounts, hiring decisions, vacation requests all be approved without having to leave Chatter.
- Chatter Service lets users ask their questions once in a familiar social feed and have the answer come to them in an instant — whether it's from the knowledge base, the community of experts or a service agent. Chatter Service will also connect to public social networks, such as Facebook.
- Data.com, launched at Dreamforce, gives sales and marketing professionals the information they need to plan, target and execute sales and marketing campaigns — all within Salesforce. Data.com will unify socially crowdsourced contact information from Jigsaw and company information from Dun & Bradstreet in one place to help customers build and maintain social customer profiles.
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