Why Yammer can't compete with Chatter!

Security! I'm not talking about general privacy and security that all SaaS vendors provide like SSL, data center security, etc. I'm referring to much more granular level of data access control which is defined and controlled at the enterprise application layer. Most companies want to control data that their users access. Take a SFA system as an example. You typically see policies that allow sales reps to  see information about their own accounts and opportunities (only), sales managers to see data belonging to their teams, regional managers within their region, ... so on and so forth. So, you'd only want your users to see Enterprise "Tweets" that they should see.

Independent Enterprise Social Networking services, like Yammer, lack visibility into external system data and the data access control policies in those systems to control who should see what. Sure you can create logical groups and confine private posts to those in the group. You can even integrate in SAP, Salesforce, Oracle EBS, etc. as members of a group but you're still not going to know which specific data updates some one should have access to, at least not very easily and not without external and custom code.

Application administrators go to great lengths to set access control rules so it would be great if the Enterprise Social Networking service could enforce those same rules. Unfortunately, they really can't. First,  they would need access to the rules which is not easy to come by (not their fault). Second, they'd need a standard way of defining the external application objects and access control rules which doesn't exist today (again, not their fault). 

Chatter has an unfair advantage by being native to Salesforce. The same data access control rules you configure for your objects are also valid for Chatter feeds. Users can only subscribe to data that they have access to. No additional work required! However, Chatter will the have the same limitations as Yammer when it comes to data objects external to Saleforce. Salesforce does provide for the flexibility of adding custom objects and associated access control rules but you'll then need to make sure you synchronize the data with your custom object(s).

I'd say that CubeTree's sale to SuccessFactors was certainly a good move on their part. Once they're integrated into SuccessFactors, they'll be in the same position as Chatter but for HR related data objects contained within SF modules.

I hope you don't take this as a beat down on Yammer and like services but when it comes to Enterprise Social Networking, they're going to lack the necessary controls to be widely adopted.

Salesforce.com Chatter: Tips for Integrating External Enterprise Events

Integrating external events can be very straightforward (from Salesforce.com's perspective). Here are a few tips to help get you going quickly.

1. Every parent object in Saleforce is Chatter Feed enabled. By default, the standard objects have been configured to create Chatter events (or feeds) as result of creates and updates (of certain key fields). To make changes, go to Setup>Customize>Chatter>Feed Tracking. You can configure feed tracking for each object (custom included) to track changes to standard and custom fields. For more information, check out this link.

2. Any existing external data integration into Salesforce can instantly be Chatter enabled. Simply go to the feed tracking page for the object of interest and enable tracking for the fields you're updating.

3. For child objects like the Opportunity Line Items, you'll notice that there's no feed tracking capability. This makes sense as you would typically want to track an Opportunity as a whole and not just individual line items. If you're updating the line items with external data such as a "Ship Date" from your ERP, add an extra step to your process to create a Chatter Feed post for the line item's parent opportunity. It's a simple Create call to add a single record to the FeedPost object.

4. Avoid creating additional custom objects and synchronizing external data if all you're interested is being notified of updates from your external applications. It not only creates more work to create and maintain the integrations, it will also require users to subscribe to additional data objects. If you only need to present data from the external systems to the users, consider building a quick mashup instead.

5. Avoid creating a User Update or Post on behalf of an external system as it will potentially bypass the security rules you have in place and may expose sensitive data to your entire org. Since users can only subscribe to Chatter events for data they have access to, it would be a best practice to create feed posts associated with specific data objects.

Collaboration in Web 2.0 Era is changing. Are you keeping up?

If you haven't noticed lately, the way we communicate is evolving. Phone calls and emails are losing ground to IM, SMS, Tweets, and Wall Posts. This is true in both social and business networks.

While Tweets and Wall Posts are great (only if you're insanely bored) for keeping up with every minute action of friends and family and have been used by businesses for B2C interactions, they lack the privacy and control required for inter-enterprise or B2B collaboration. 

Also, when it comes to the business communication and collaboration, we've been missing an important collaborator, namely, the business applications. That's right, we need Salesforce.com, Eloqua, SAP, Oracle Apps,.... to proactively communicate events and collaborate with us too. It's a symbiotic relationship that up until now has not been working very smoothly.

To solve this problem, Salesforce introduced their latest and greatest innovation, Chatter, at Dreamforce '09. Despite the lengthy introduction by it's passionate creator, Marc Benioff, it was clear that Salesforce is onto something that will have a big impact on how we work every day. With Chatter for Salesforce, you can keep track of any changes you subscribe to without having to set up complex workflow rules or repeatedly check the object(s) of interest for changes. Marc Benioff is admittedly copying Facebook and Twitter's model and applying it to the business world.

Seems like Lars Daalgard has his eye on the ball too. Last month, SuccessFactors acquired CubeTree, a business/social networking provider. Where as Chatter is tightly coupled and integrated into Salesforce, today, CubeTree is not application specific but offers a rich set of APIs that will allow for easy integration. I suspect that it will be natively integrated with the rest of the SFSF suite in the coming Qs.

While Chatter and (integrated) CubeTree will be great for all events occurring within their respective applications, they will require integration to other applications within the enterprise to complete the collaboration loop. And while monitoring data changes in applications can be easy straightforward, you'll need to know which corresponding object in Salesforce (as an example) to relate the change events too. Which means, you'll still need to synchronize your base objects before SAP can send you notifications via Chatter.

For business execution, you need collaboration between people and systems. For systems to collaborate, you'll need to be able to speak their language and translate to human speak.