Salesforce unveils Chatter Free

Salesforce.com has launched Chatter Free, the latest version of Salesforce Chatter, that allows any Salesforce user to invite colleagues to collaborate with Salesforce Chatter.

Chatter Free will “accelerate adoption of social collaboration throughout the enterprise” says Salesforce, who bills the tech as the industry’s first enterprise collaboration app and platform.

“Leveraging the social features popularised by Facebook and Twitter -- such as profiles, status updates and real-time feeds -- Chatter lets employees ‘follow’ documents, people, business processes and application data. The result is a new level of productivity that crosses departments and organisational barriers,” said the company.

“The industry’s reception of Salesforce Chatter has blown away our expectations,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. “The fact that more than 60,000 enterprises have deployed Chatter within the first five months is amazing and the Chatter Free social invites are going to take Chatter enterprise-wide.”

Salesforce Chatter is now available and included for free with all paying user licenses of Salesforce CRM and Force.com.

Salesforce.com has also announced it’s entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Heroku, a cloud application platform for writing Ruby-based applications.

“The next era of cloud computing is social, mobile and real-time. I call it Cloud 2,” said Benioff. “Ruby is the language of Cloud 2, and Heroku is the leading Ruby application platform-as-a-service for Cloud 2 that is fuelling this growing community. We think this acquisition will uniquely position salesforce.com as the cornerstone for the next generation of app developers.”

HP was recently reported to be in talks to sign a massive customer relationship management deal with Salesforce.com, dropping Oracle in the process.