Salesforce.com is extending its Chatter enterprise social networking service to Salesforce Communities, a new tool that allows companies to create private social communities.
While Salesforce Chatter supports group collaboration that enterprises can use to engage customers and partners outside their organisations, Salesforce Communities takes things further by allowing you to slap your own branding for each community that you’re engaged with.
For instance, you could have separate community support groups for various customer segments, and specific groups for partners across different product segments.
Like Chatter, Salesforce Communities integrates with business processes in Salesforce CRM and other business applications. That means you can share a work-in-progress document like a customer case study with resellers to seek their inputs, or collaborate with customers to develop a new product.
Salesforce Communities is Salesforce.com’s latest effort to realise its vision of a social enterprise, where enterprises actively engage employees, customers, partners and other stakeholders through social networking tools across all aspects of business.
Mary Wardley, IDC’s vice president for CRM and enterprise applications, said in a media statement: “Salesforce Communities will enable companies to build stronger, more valuable relationships with customers, partners and employees through custom communities – designed to address and support specific business needs.”
She added: “When delivered within the context of the business process of Salesforce, Communities has the potential to facilitate strategic collaboration across enterprises and with customers and partners above the capabilities of online peer communities, which have the tendency to be either entirely conversational or entirely transactional.”
Salesforce Communities will be available in a limited pilot in fall 2012 and is expected to be generally available in the second half of 2013.
