A user in my company told me of Chatter. It looks interesting but let me offer this before I ask my question.
When considering any collaboration solution for a company's use, one must consider the necessity of ownership of the solution. If the company does not "own" i.e. CONTROL the solution, then it is a renegade solution and that is fraught with peril.
Therefore, the first thing I did as the Director if IT in my company, is sign up as the first user. Then I went looking for information about controlling the application. Other than being the moderator, by default I suppose, there is precious little information showing how I can control how this is used.
The other concern is one of persistence. If we become dependent on this solution, aside from the assurance of 90 days notice, we must be able to affordably maintain our use of this or be force to abandon it.
Questions:
I would like to see more ability of a company to OFFICIALY control this application. What are your plans to provide a special interface for the moderator?
About an hour after I created the first account the user who told me about this signed up too, Can we limit the signing up to be by invitation ONLY?
Can we limit the groups that uerss can join?
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I pose my concerns and ask my questions in good faith and in the spirit of community.
Thank you.
Hal
1 Antwort
Hello,
I only signed up yesterday, and from what I gathered, here are some answers to your questions:
When users sign up, they are required to sign up with your company's domain. Once they do, this will put them in the General/All category of the group. This is expected as they are an employee of the company. What you'll need to do is then create a group that is accessible by invitation only. So, for example, you'd have a group set up like:
Execs (Invitation only), IT (Invitation only), General (Open to all), etc.
You would then limit the groups a user can join by limiting the groups that are open, and making more invitation-only groups.
As far as data ownership goes, this is available under the Privacy Overview, which states that Customer Data is protected under SalesForce's Master Subscription Agreement. In this agreement, under statement 7.3, you'll read:
7.3. Ownership of Your Data. As between Us and You, You exclusively own all rights, title and interest in and to all of Your Data.
Lastly, regarding your ability to "officially" control the application - do you mean you'd prefer it to reside on your servers? If that's the case, I believe there are open-source communication tools that may provide you with this option. As far as Chatter goes, I've only come across two options:Chatter Free
Features:
-Profiles
-Status updates
-Activity feeds
-Groups
-File sharing
-Chatter Desktop
-Chatter Mobile
-Private and secure
and:
Chatter Plus ($15/user/month)Includes all features available for free plus:
-Accounts (read-only)*
-Contacts (read-only)*
-10 custom objects*
-1 custom app*
-Dashboards*
-Reports*
-Answers and ideas
-Integration with 900+ AppExchange apps
-Workflow
-Calendar and events
-Tasks and activities
-Sharing and security model
*For Professional Edition customers, new Chatter users will not have access to accounts, contacts, and custom objects unless they have the profiles and page layouts add-on product previously enabled.
