The much-hyped Salesforce Chatter went into private beta earlier this month, and demonstrations given to customers have made a definite effort to highlight the platform’s “fun” qualities—not just its functionalities. On Wednesday, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff noted in a guest post on TechCrunch that he’s long wondered why enterprise software isn’t more like Facebook, and that the giant social network is the inspiration for the Salesforce Chatter.

Since Chatter was announced last year at the Dreamforce conference, arguments have been made on both sides as to whether or not the enterprise needs this kind of social networking. Now that Chatter has gone into beta, however, people are focusing their attention on whether or not Chatter is a viable threat to Microsoft SharePoint. Yes, SharePoint is widely used, but Salesforce execs note that it is not a “fun” product. It’s functional—and Salesforce Chatter aims to bring both collaborative functionality and, to an extent, entertainment.

Salesforce’s George Hu, the Executive VP of Marketing and Alliances, stated from the first that Salesforce wants to poach from the SharePoint market. Chatter is, of course, very different from SharePoint—SharePoint is a much more traditional collaboration platform, with file sharing over email and through folders, client software, Microsoft Exchange, etc. Chatter’s focus on collaboration mimics the concept of Facebook’s feeds—the necessary information is brought to the user, and they don’t have to mine unsorted data for what they need. In addition, Chatter gives a face and a voice to all employees using it, which can be especially helpful in a large enterprise.

Chatter’s resemblance to Facebook has, in many ways, branded it as a social networking tool, but it boasts some good document sharing and collaboration features, which will likely sway some SharePoint users to the platform. Chatter will be generally released this summer, and users will need to be using the Salesforce CRM platform to access it—this fact could definitely prevent SharePoint users from switching.

It’s tough to say how big a bite Chatter will take out of SharePoint. Chatter has the advantage of social networking, which is becoming a fixture in enterprise despite the fact that many deem it a distraction. It’ll be interesting to hear more about the platform in the coming months, and read more reviews when it’s generally released. We’re also curious to see what kind of competitive improvements Microsoft makes to SharePoint—the platform isn’t static, and surely Microsoft will take some measures to absorb the Chatter-impact.

Microsoft products have found a home in the majority of offices, but mostly in the form of personal productivity suites, like the ever-popular Office. Still, those familiar with, or looking for, CRM and ERP solutions have probably heard of Microsoft’s Dynamics platforms.

There will perhaps always be Microsoft naysayers, but there is little denying that their products must have some merits, given their popularity. Microsoft Dynamics CRM has been extremely popular, and Microsoft released a hosted version of Dynamics CRM 4 in 2008, thereby entering an arena with the likes of Salesforce.com and SugarCRM.

In Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4 Integration Unleased, authors Marc J. Wolenik and Rajya Vardham Bhaiya take a look at best practices, techniques, and sample code for using Dynamics CRM 4 to its greatest extent. Bhaiya and Wolenik recently sat down with InformIT.com, and answered some questions about what exactly, is the appeal of the titular platform.

Wolenik and Bhaiya do justice by the product—they don’t mention any faults, but they do make note of some features companies may be unaware Dynamics CRM 4 has. One thing the two do mention—something anyone discussing the merits of Microsoft productivity software seems to mention—is that it’s built on .NET technology and can be easily extended. Microsoft software is largely supported by existing infrastructure, making it an obvious choice at times.

For those who don’t think the choice is obvious, the authors give some notes to businesses considering Salesforce.com, or another CRM platform. (Unfortunately, the question was posed as “Microsoft vs. established CRM vendors,” so much of the answer aims to prove that Dynamics CRM is established. Wolenik notes that Dynamics CRM goes beyond just “customer” relationship management, and works to consolidate many line-of-business apps onto one platform. Meanwhile, Bhaiya points out that Dynamics CRM allows custom configuration for all of its packages, not just the premium ones (which is the practice Salesforce.com maintains).

The two also argue that Dynamics CRM 4’s integrative capabilities with SharePoint and Outlook cannot be matched, and Microsoft offers a flexible licensing structure for those companies that can, and want to, support an on-premise deployment.
For most companies in search of CRM, though, Microsoft’s big win will perhaps always be the comfort level it offers. Familiar UIs are always nice, and it’s also good to see that Microsoft hasn’t completely turtled in offering other features because of it. We’re curious to see what they come up with in 2010—and if they get even more aggressive with SaaS CRM providers like Salesforce.

Yesterday, Salesforce.com announced it would be offering $500 million aggregate principal amount of convertible senior notes due 2015, in a private placement to qualified institutional buyers pursuant to Rule 144A under the Securities Act of 1933. In layman’s terms: Salesforce’ll be floating a $500 million convertible bond offering, the bonds are due in 2015, and the cloud-computing evangelists will enter hedge fund transactions to minimize future dilution on shareholders.

Salesforce.com stock has previously fallen 5.5%, to $69.59, but they are still doing extremely well and dominate the cloud-based CRM market—so many people are scratching their heads over why exactly a company with cash is floating debt.

Most likely, Salesforce.com is going to use these funds for acquisitions. Salesforce has long been at the forefront of SaaS CRM, but they still need a strategy to remain at the market’s helm. And as they specified such a large amount of money, it seems less likely that Salesforce is taking advantage of low rates, and more likely that they have a specific use for the money in mind.

Given the completeness of Salesforce’s grasp CRM offering it could be any number of things, but what do you think they have their eye on?

This week, LoopFuse’s VP of Field Operations, Matt Quinlan, sat down with Helpstream’s Bill Odell to discuss utilizing Social CRM to create customer success. Quinlan oversees sales, marketing, and “customer success” at the on-demand marketing automation vendor, and gave some insight into how LoopFuse has been using a Helpstream community to optimize his work. Helpstream is a self-proclaimed provider of Social CRM, and offers integrations for Oracle and Salesforce.com users. Their product is built for web-driven customer service and support, ultimately engaging customers through the creation of a community.

An example of a Helpstream Online Community

One of the interesting points Quinlan made is that Helpstream has been integral to his ensuring customer success as LoopFuse grew. The bigger the company became, the more difficult it was to ensure customers were satisfied throughout the implementation process (in LoopFuse’s fledgling days, assistance was performed on a one-on-one basis). Quinlan states that deploying a Helpstream community allowed LoopFuse to provide better customer service via an interactive, searchable, digital environment.

The suggestion is that having a customer community will soon be as important as having a company website. Now, this isn’t surprising considering the information came from the Helpstream website, but the information’s source doesn’t preclude its validity. Helpstream users are provided with the ability to engage their customers through the community—as opposed to customers passively consuming content—which helps them maintain stronger relationships.

Integrating social media into CRM, creating Social CRM, has been a much-debated topic over the past few years. It’s tough to find a solution that utilizes the technology effectively without creating distractions in office, and perhaps greater adoption and monitoring of the customer community is a step in the right direction. Only time will tell how many other large companies employ similar communities, and with what amount of success, but for now it seems a good way for large companies to reach out to customers with social media—something that’s eluded them for a while now.

Earlier this month, CRM Buyer re-released an interesting story as part of a “Best of ECT News” series, and it touched upon an important aspect of business management that many SMBs are reluctant to implement: time reporting.

Small- and medium-sized businesses tend to have their CRM spread across multiple applications, so it’s not surprising that some invaluable applications can be neglected. But time tracking is not to be ignored, because it provides important information about where companies are making money (i.e. which customers are the most profitable), to control costs and revenue growth, and helps to really understand costs and focus on key areas. Having an automated system to streamline tasks is beneficial for cutting administrative costs.

Time tracking applications are recommended for companies with 30 or more employees, but they can also be helpful for even smaller business and freelance workers. Simply put, it helps users to not only keep track of their time, but also to make the best-informed decisions when it comes to projects and clients.

Still, CRM Buyer points out that many SMBs are hesitant to adopt these programs, and for a variety of reasons. Some companies are just averse to change; some might find their employees take offense at being asked to record their time at work; and many people just don’t like timesheets. But timesheets can help enforce union contracts and consistency, and the advice given to managers here is to fully explain the business needs for these time-reporting tools.

Naturally, a lot has changed with the economic decline, and time-tracking apps are reportedly on the rise. That time reporters are priceless in running a business isn’t surprising, but what is amazing is the number of companies—no matter what the size—that are shying from using them. Still, most everyone has been affected by the economy, so the demand for these types of productivity tools is only increasing, and will likely cement their status as a business management staple.

And of course, because no CRM application is considered complete if you can’t access it from your iPhone, most time-reporting companies are offering mobile applications.

Salesforce.com’s annual cloud computing event is underway, and we will be live-blogging the news as the day progresses (or you can “watch” it unfold here). Salesforce has enjoyed a good couple of months–they reported strong Q3 earnings, and launched an update of Service Cloud, their fastest growing product. It’ll be interesting to see what happens today, and what direction the company will take.

CEO Marc Benioff has long praised the real-time cloud and social media streams, and today Salesforce announced its “Facebook for enterprise”: Salesforce Chatter. Chatter will provide companies with real-time collaboration capabilities in a secure, pritvate social network for their busniess. Connections are leveraged through the profiles, feeds and groups that can be created for content, people, and applications, and Chatter also touts status updates and Twitter–the most relevant tweets are filtered into the Chatter platform.

Example of a profile on Chatter--it does look a lot like Facebook!

The above photo shows the profile-page setup within Salesforce Chatter. The stock photo is of a user’s profile, but keep in mind that products and applications can have their own profiles, and join the conversation through status changes as well. Users can also post content, documents, spreadsheets, and presentations to Chatter’s newsfeed, and there is a multi-tenant sharing model. In addition, native applications built on Force.com can stream updates to Salesforce Chatter. And naturally, Chatter will support mobile devices, and will be available on BlackBerry, Windows Mobile phones, and the iPhone. It will be available in 2010, and included in all paid editions of Salesforce CRM and Force.com; it will be offered independently for $50 per user per month.

During Benioff’s keynote, he acknowledged 4 clouds: Sales Cloud 2, Service Cloud 2, and Custom Cloud 2, and the fourth was unnamed, and is presumed to be Chatter.

Intuit is reinventing itself for the Web, and its latest product is an online version of the ever-popular contact manager. Due in large part to the economic downturn, many companies have released similar offerings this year—Salesforce.com has the Contact Manager Edition, and SugarCRM has Sugar Express—and now Intuit is aiming to get SMBs online with their Customer Manager.

Like the Salesforce and Sugar products, Customer Manager is light CRM for small businesses—a tool to help them store information in a streamlined space instead of across multiple applications. Customer Manager is browser-based and customizable, and information entered into the database syncs with Intuit’s QuickBooks, which is where this contact manager supersedes the Sugar and Salesforce offerings. With the QuickBooks integration, users can see information about financial transactions (see image below), update calendar information, and also import and export information from Outlook and Exchange.

Customer Manager for Mobile is the extension for smartphones, designed for mobile viewing. It provides all the capabilities of the desktop version, but so far is supports only BlackBerry phones (thought Intuit notes they are actively working with other smartphone manufacturers to support other devices). Also, Customer Manager has collaborative functionalities, so information entered and edited from the mobile edition will be updated for employees using the desktop version, and vice versa. Currently, Customer Manager is offering a free month-long trial, and then costs $9.95 a month for up for five users.

Intuit’s new product may be simple, but it is impressive. Of course, it seems a logical step given the large number of SMBs using QuickBooks, and executives at Intuit have stated that this is one of many online extensions we’ll be seeing. The contact management space has certainly been expanding this year, with some definite CRM heavyweights vying for the market, and it will be interesting to see what other products are released in 2010.

Update: Salesforce.com announced at Dreamforce that it will be releasing a contact manager for SMBs as well.

For a while now, IBM has been shifting their focus from hardware to software, and recently, CFO Mark Loughridge told us that they were investing lost in business analytics. Today, the company announced a very large fruit of that endeavor: the IBM Smart Analytics Cloud. This product is the for IBM clients, and is accompanying the release of Blue Insight, which is an internal product that will be the world’s largest private cloud-computing analytics environment for business analytics.

Predating this release are the recent acquisitions of data analytics company SPSS for $1.2 billion, business analytics firm RedPill, and Canadian business intelligence developer Cognos. In addition, IBM recently performed a Global CIO study and found 83% of respondents were looking to business intelligence and analytics to boost competitiveness.

Blue Insight, the internal offering, will give IBM’s sales and development department (some 200,000 employees) the ability to gather data and information—from customer relationships to demand trends to shipping times—for more efficient decision making to gain further insight at point of sale. One of the most impressive aspects of Blue Insight is its scope: information will come from about 100 different info warehouses that make up more than a petabyte of information—100 times the content of the Library of Congress.

IBM Smart Analytics Cloud will provide customers with the same scalable architecture of Blue Insight, and like its internal sister, will tout many of the Cognos 8 BI tools. Customers will be able to create reports, dashboards, and scorecards for monitoring business performance, and also import data for strategic analysis. And the addition of this vast information source also gives IBM the opportunity to offer an impressive bundle: hardware, software, middleware, and consulting and maintenance services. And the folks at Forbes posit that if IBM adds data mining and real-time analytics, they will strike gold.

IBM’s foray into the software market has been extremely fruitful, and this new product will certainly spark copies from other software companies. It will be interesting to see who else joins the business analytics-cloud race.

In the spirit of CRM systems acting as unified platforms for sales, marketing, customer service and now social media, Helpstream announced last week that they are adding marketing automation integrability to their social CRM offering. Helpstream’s CEO, Bob Warfield, says that active customer service communities pave the way for a focus on marketing, and using social media streams helps sales teams assess the customer voice and identify leads.

Helpstream’s latest release provides productized integrations with marketing automation solutions from Marketo, Infusionsoft, and others; companies can integrate Helpstream CRM with any marketing automation provider. The social marketing includes: “overhead” cloud feeds enabling users to integrate any social network, Twiter monitoring, and a “mention this” function that pre-sets Twitter responses.

Tech pundit and president of The 56 Group, Paul Greenberg, thinks this is a smart offering, noting that in an age where SaaS vendors are emphasizing customer service in the cloud, Helpstream is augmenting their line by providing a workflow engine in addition to their community platform. In many ways, this puts Helpstream in direct competition with bigger CRM providers like Salesforce.com, Oracle, and of course Lithium, who’ve already added social CRM capabilities.

Cutting contact center costs is an ongoing obstacle, with managers trying to streamline operations while retaining employees. The contact center market has slowed some with the recession (as most sectors under the CRM umbrella have), but there has been a bit growth in the US, Canada, Europe, and Australia, where there’s been increasing offshoring of contact centers. That information comes from research firm Datamonitor, where analyst Peter Ryan notes that South Africa, Egypt, Kenya, and Malaysia have had considerable success as offshore locations. But there is a general overhaul afoot in the contact center sector.

For one, the landscape of contact centers is changing, as customer segmentation—that is, separating them into meaningful and cost-efficient categories—becomes increasingly important. From a contact-center software standpoint, it’s interesting to note that while the creation of customer subdivisions is gaining popularity, it is recommended that companies employ one unified contact center solution.

And while offshoring is intensifying in the aforementioned countries, companies looking to keep those services close to home are adopting more automated processes, and even employing home agents—Datamonitor’s survey revealed 44% of contact center managers were considering the home agent solution.

As with other facets of CRM, contact centers are also affected by the rise of social networking, and for now, product managers are mostly just strategizing the incorporation of social media. However, it should be noted that customer support devices benefit the most from social media—unlike other CRM tools, where it can be difficult to find a place for all that unstructured data—and will likely bolster growth in this sector after the recession.