Connect, discover and share

It's easy to become bogged down trying to deal with huge amounts of data and content. Add email volume into the mix and it's clear that a better way is needed to manage information and data.

Chatter, embedded within Salesforce.com, provides a number of tools to connect, share and discover. It's facebook-style interaction for the enterprise without the privacy concerns. Chatter brings social media functionality to the enterprise.

Within an instance of Salesforce.com users can follow other users, groups, data objects and other applications. For instance, if a User A updates a client record and User B happens to be following either user A or the client record then the update appears in User B's activity stream.

Organisations which have implemented Chatter cite the following benefits:

• Connections are exploding - more people are linking up and sharing information and expertise
• Apps are brought to life - for instance, as deals are closed, the entire organisation can be made aware of such successes
• Discovery unleashed - with increased visibility of updates, questions, etc the entire organisation is in a position to relate previously hidden information to existing challenges and opportunities
• Sharing content - users can post new content: manuals, presentations, proposals, etc which can be instantly reviewed by peers and other experts
• Actively engaging executives - it's easier to engage with execs and receive direct feedback

All of the above without having to send or receive one email.

Check it out, it's worth the effort...

Motivation and drive

Great clip on what drives and motivates us. Keywords: autonomy, mastery and purpose. Check it out, 11 minutes!

Chatter - Facebook for the enterprise - launched

Following the announcement at Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference last November Chatter is now generally available to subscribers.

This represents a significant step forward in enterprise collaboration given Chatter's tight integration capabilities with all things Salesforce.com. Some of the key features include:

• Profiles - users can create and maintain profiles including their expertise and current role, location, etc. Also useful for tracking new hires and transfers
• Status updates - enough said!
• Groups - create groups to collaborate on accounts, opportunities, projects, etc
• Feeds - subscribe to groups, projects, people and follow their enterprise exploits
• App updates - keep abreast of updates to application data: opportunities, accounts, contacts and even custom object data
• Document sharing - works with content so documents can be shared and updates monitored
• Security and confidentiality - works with existing data access & confidentiality rules
• Social networks - plays well with other social media like Twitter and Facebook
• Mobility - works on mobile devices as well

All in all, a very compelling offering!

Contact us if you'd like more insight

VMforce launched!

After weeks of feverish speculation (if you follow cloud computing, that is) Salesforce.com (SFDC) and VMware have revealed what VMforce really is.

First of, it's not an SFDC offering for private or hybrid clouds (kudos to SFDC for it's continued purist public cloud stance) nor is it entirely similar to Amazon's EC2, what some were dubbing virtualisation-as-a-service.

It's billed as the world's first enterprise Java cloud. I see it as something between force.com platform-as-a-service and the EC2 infrastructure-as-a-service which leverages off VMware's SpringSource acquisition. Essentially, apps and services can be developed in java and can run on force.com and therefore enjoy the benefits of all things java and the force.com value-add features: access to analytics, workflows, triggers, chatter, user access control and the database. And it's scalable and open.

Existing java apps can be ported without having to be re-written in Apex, investment in java resources can be leveraged and there is therefore no real fear of lock-in.

All of the above should find further favour with hitherto skeptical CIOs.

As a side note, I'm surprised that the current copy on the VMforce home page does not emphasise the force.com benefits but focuses on the other important aspects: scalability, openess and trustworthiness.

This is a promising development and one to be watched.

Managing change in a SaaS environment

Migrating applications to the cloud poses a particular set of change management challenges for organisations.

The many benefits of cloud computing are well known. At a high level these can be grouped into infrastructure and application management benefits.

Let's focus on some of these benefits from an application management perspective: scalability, rapid deployment, ease of configuration changes and a culture of iterative releases. These benefits inevitably result in key stakeholder groups requiring a change in mindset especially during the post roll-out release cycles.

The typical implementation consists of a rapid deployment to either the entire user base or a subset of users. This is then followed by a series of new functional releases and a roll-out to the remaining user base. This can be described as a rolling roll-out and requires the deployment team to think differently.

From the requirements gathering process right through to the training sessions the deployment team has to adjust to running multiple mini-releases in a compressed time frame. This is not sustainable indefinitely but can be done over a 12 to 18 month period as opposed to a having one massive release at the end of, say, a 15 month project.

The key to success lies in the ability of the deployment team to re-engineer and re-imagine the old way of doing things. This means defining the nature of application changes and developing a strategy to manage each of these types of changes. For example, basic configuration changes will not require the full suite of change control tasks while new functionality which requires some level of code customisation will require a more rigorous approach.

Enterprise social collaboration in the cloud

Check out what Martin Moran of Salesforce.com on his recent trip to South Africa has to say about their latest innovation, dubbed Chatter, facebook for the enterprise.

Chatter provides facebook-style networking and collaboration tools to enterprise users. While there are numerous pretenders to the throne, the combination of collaboration tools, the force.com platform and the sales or service application (Salesforce.com's original services) makes for a powerful and flexible offering.

Read more on ITWeb IT-online and Techcentral

Cloud computing overview

Straight-forward explanantion of cloud computing. Covers iaas, saas, and paas at a high level as well as the main characteristics of cloud services and issues. Cloud services:

• are elastic, can be bought by the hour, month, etc
• are flexible and scalable
• help organsations avoid capital expenditure

Agree with the above but the last one is a benefit not a characteristic.

While security is always an issue, a useful analogy to consider is that of money in the bank. We're more comfortable with holding cash in the bank rather than at home for instance. Simply because banks invest much more in security than a single homeowner ever would. Same goes for data stored on an organsation's server compared to a specialist cloud service provider