Salesforce.com announced that licensed users of Chatter can now invite non-licensed users to join Chatter – for FREE. Great marketing move but I am hearing the laptops being thrown by security and governance people. Isn’t the whole point of these “internal social networks” to allow risk-free communications within the firewalls? Yes and no. Initially the goal is to likely break down silos say between business and IT or Sales and Support but as deployments have better adoption and internal best-practices are established, companies will see the value of expanding services to customers, vendors or partners – a natural progression for many. It is two-fold for Salesforce.com – I imagine:
- Companies can buy limited seats from Salesforce for Chatter and then encourage users to invite others within the company to collaborate for free. Then Salesforce can go back and can make a business case to the company to expand the seat buy.
- Salesforce can take invited, non-licensed users and market to them.
Sneaky feature add-on dressed up as a product launch. For you security people who are freaked now that people outside the firewall/company can be part of this fun thing called collaboration – fear not – you can disable this. But it brings a better topic to the forefront: Security, Governance and Roles and Responsibilities. If you have those items under control along with an open line of communication with business and IT – this should only be a discussion point. You may already have a roadmap of when/if you are going external. If you don’t, its a good idea to start those conversations if you are considering collaboration tools of any sort from IM, Internal Social Software products or Project Management tools. The Don’s of the world know its smart to get security involved early so they can plan on securing the application and training the workforce around roles, responsibilities and best practices.
At the end of the day, you are going to likely see other offerings follow suit and offer free external access. Why not, paid users being product champions to non-users? What could be better? From a user standpoint, they will enjoy the ability to seamlessly collaborate regardless of licensing (with a clear roles/responsibility understanding). From a enterprise view, it starts conversations, redefines roadmaps, and brings Security and Governance to the forefront of collaboration – standing next to IT and Business where it should be.
Hi Jonathan,
Thanks for blogging about Chatter Free. Just want to correct that this is just for collaboration within your company on the same domain, not for use with external users. Everything is still within the firewall. For example, if you have a company with 100 users, and 10 of them are using Salesforce for CRM, the other 90 users can now use Chatter for free… at no extra cost at all. Those 90 users just won’t have access to core CRM data and functionality, but they can create groups, share files, and follow each other.
Robin Daniels
Director, Product Marketing, Salesforce Chatter