Salesforce 'breaks open' Chatter with social push

Salesforce.com has announced a social-networking platform for customers alongside new capabilities for its Chatter software.

Salesforce has demonstrated a new mobile interface for its apps, as well as announcing a raft of new Chatter capabilities. Photo credit: Salesforce

The products and product set is called "The Social Enterprise", EMEA marketing vice president Tim Barker told ZDNet UK.

"There is an ever-growing social divide between companies and their customers," Barker said. "Customers and your employees are on social networks on mobile devices, but what about your company?"

To this end, Salesforce introduced on Wednesday a Chatter Customer Groups capability, which will let companies link customers and employees into social networks, said Barker. The capability will be joined to two other new initiatives: Chatter Now, which consists of real-time collaboration and instant messaging; and Chatter Service, which pools expertise in a community.

Companies will be able to create social customer profiles by taking contact data from Salesforce and linking that to social information scraped from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Firms will also be able to put together private or public social networks for partners, customers and products.

"We're breaking open Chatter so you can start to invite your customers and your employees into a collaboration space," said Barker.

Saleforce also announced on Wednesday an HTML 5 interface called touch.salesforce.com for customer applications built on the Force.com platform. The URL gives a default touchscreen interface for mobile access to Salesforce apps.

In addition, Salesforce's Heroku platform-as-a-service will from Wednesday support applications written in Java. Developers could already use Ruby on Rails, Clojure and Node.js on the platform.