Chatter and Quad, why do they matter to you?

Chatter is the new Facebook-like collaboration tool announced this week by salesforce.com, and is focused on internal collaboration. I was also briefed by Cisco in their new all-in-one enterprise collaboration platform called Quad.  Pricing was not yet available, but there should be a Quad app out this summer for iPhone and iPad.  They talked about their “prosumer” video camera the “Flip mono pro” with 16GB/4 hours recording time. This is coupled with a cloud-based hosting service which then makes it applicable to enterprise policies. Since they bought Jabber a year or so ago they have been pushing XMPP (a standard that conflicts with Microsoft’s SIP).

The goal of Quad is twofold: first to integrate all of the disparate collaboration functions (IP communication, mobile applications, Telepresence, conferencing, messaging, blogs, wikis, threaded discussions, etc.) that Cisco has into one tool that is usable by the enterprise; second, to allow workspaces that were formerly static and asynchronous to be more dynamic by adding real time collaboration functions

 Quad is currently bundled with Cisco Show&Share and is in limited availability in July. This is social software for the enterprise which means that there is a policy engine attached to it to make sure users follow corporate policies. But is also ad-hoc and a very flexible system, and is licensed to the content creator not those that look at the content. Pricing was not available at the briefing but will be announced sometime in July.  Initially they are limiting the number of video streams to 50, as even that many would have severe impact on enterprise network bandwidth. Cisco is bringing together the world of collaboration and the world of unified commun-ications under one interface (as it should be) in Quad.

Chatter

Is really a tool for internal communications and collaboration? For existing customers, Chatter is free as a new feature. The company has a Chatter-only option for $15 a month for each user.

 Although Salesforce compares to Facebook (for business) it is more like a combination of both Facebook and Twitter. Like in Twitter you can have “followers” (figure 1) but it is also a workspace where you can store documents (like a price list) and have comments attached to the document in a threaded discussion.

Salesforce hopes to bring in new customers with Chatter to add to their current 77,300. 5000 of those customers tested Chatter in beta.

 In addition, major enterprise players plan to integrate Chatter into their Force.com applications. CA Technol-ogies has built a development application that integrates Chatter to better track projects. BMC Software also plans to integrate Chatter into its BMC ServiceDesk application on Force.com. Salesforce.com will also be a reseller of ServiceDesk. Both will be available on the ChatterExchange.