Chatter

The book I read to research this post was Developing Applications With Salesforce Chatter by Rakesh Gupta which is a very good book which I read at

http://safaribooksonline.com

This book is rather short but is part of the same series the book on Yammer which I did yesterday was also part ot. It can be split into 2 halves with the first portion about using Chatter & the rest on writing apps. Chatter is similiar to Yammer in that it's a program you can run on a company server that allows a corporate social network normally for employees at a company. You can have 1 main group and then lots of smaller groups for maybe different departments. You can have a community group which allows in trading partners and customers to participate in a group. You can also have hybrid groups where part of the network is stored on cloud computing and the rest on a company server. Like Facebook & Yammer each member of a group has a feed to keep them updated as to what is going on. In addition to group members there are a group owner and a group manager both with additional powers. This program integrates and is owned by salesforce.com and there suite of products. Your customers can buy either a standard licence or plus licence that allows them to participate in your Chatter group. Obviously the plus licence grants more powers. In addition as well as the standard version of Chatter there are developer, professional, enterprise & unlimited versions. The developer edition is for people learning Chatter and app writing. I think most companies can get by with either the standard or at most professional version. I enjoyed reading this and it's an interesting subject but is somewhat short. There don't seem to be many books about Chatter which is a shame.