The VAR Guy

Let’s cut right to the chase: Peter Coffee, Salesforce.com’s director of ecosystem platform research, says the SaaS provider’s Chatter business social platform will go live on June 22nd. Here’s what to expect when it does — and our take on its impact in the IT channel.

Coffee disclosed the launch date during his keynote at the Ingram Micro Cloud Summit in Dallas. (Here’s a quick recap of the event.)

The VAR Guy already covered Chatter’s goals in depth back in January 2010, but here’s a quick recap. Chatter is aimed at pushing Salesforce.com application data, Google Apps data, and social network updates into a live feed. Users make profiles, and can form project groups to access custom social feeds. Moreover, it enables VARs to build social applications on top of the Chatter platform, and all of the Force.com applications already support it.

Social networking is hot and getting hotter in the channel — Socialwok made waves adding that kind of functionality to Google Apps, and only a few weeks ago they brought it to Microsoft Outlook. That said, Socialwok still hasn’t released a paid version of their solution, and it remains to be seen if Chatter will be a successful value-add for Salesforce.com.

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