Salesforce Chatter vs. Microsoft SharePoint 2010
On the eve of significant CRM product launches RFPConnect decided to help buy side people make wise purchase decisions and know which rocks may appear on the way to successful CRM strategy. In addition, we tried to highlight key points that make upcoming releases of Salesforce.com`s Chatter and Microsoft SharePoint 2010 close but much diverse at the same time.
Despite some pitfalls in CRM implementations during past two years industry of Customer Relationship Management software keeps on breath and has managed to learn some lessons from the recent economic turmoil. According to the recent report from Forrester Research technology solutions weren’t the only stumbling stones in successful CRM stories. Business processes (27%), people (22%), and lack of sensible CRM strategy and deployment (18%) also played their role in cases when company couldn’t get positive ROI picture using appropriate, sometimes very solid CRM software. That’s why key advice RFPConnect gives you in CRM product selection process is to pay attention if the exact software corresponds with the enterprise business strategy and your current management system. The question of CRM product for financial professionals is even more ticklish.
Another element you shouldn’t forget about is a proper TECHNOLOGY PLATFORM and DATABASE. Their robust combination promises effective future lifecycle for your CRM goals. If your company has strong ambitions concerning client coverage you will not go far without mobile interaction capabilities. Social networking led CRM space into the epoch of complete peer collaboration placing firms and their clients as well as their competitors face to face. That’s why CRM software market is experiencing a wave of social media integration. Salesforce.com`s Chatter and SharePoint 2010 from Microsoft, upcoming breakthroughs in CRM world, leave great expectations and promise to make collaboration activities simpler. To find out what makes SharePoint 2010 differ from Chatter I took part in the webinar of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Breakthrough Series and was pleasantly surprised to receive the following extremely descriptive response to my question “What is the difference between Chatter and SharePoint 2010?
Kathleen Summers, Marketing Associate from Infinity Info Systems, company that assisted Microsoft in the event, gave detailed explanation to my puzzle:
" The feature list for Chatter is pretty high level at this point. In our experience, most 1.0 applications are pretty basic and rarely live up to expectations. Chatters “approach” or marketing message is to make collaboration more “fun” and more like Facebook. We agree that apps need to be easy to use and perhaps “fun” will help people use them more, but our focus is solving business issues. Our concern would be once you have a team of say 10-20 people on a project and all of these streams of information are flowing at you, will that be more efficient than the SP approach.
Some of the core differences we see are:
- The use of Chatter will require users to be on the Salesforce CRM platform, whereas, the Microsoft stack is more flexible and you choose what you need and who needs it.
- We do know, at least initially, Chatter will require development resources as it is being built with the Force.com platform. So for many of the features available out of box for SharePoint they will need to be coded for Chatter. E.g. RSS feeds for getting notifications. Notifications in Chatter will be in the portal view, not actually pushed out to you as a user e.g. via email. Another would be version control of documents.
- There will be document collaboration in Chatter, but again, at last initially this will required force.com and Google API development to make happen. Being a GoogleSF combination, it will be via Google docs, and not with standard Office files. Google docs does provide for import and export into Office format, but our experience shows that it is best for basic formatted documents, anything with tables and images tends to get a bit skewed.
- Pull vs push, meaning you have to go to the app and look to know what is happening, vs having information pushed to you, letting you know
- Single sign on not possible with Chattersf solutions. Not a real big issue but we find that users tend to hate to have to login into multiple applications using different logins.
- Workflow capabilities and automating business process is a key focus for SP 2010, something that so far has not been mentioned or documented in Chatter. So for now, any type of automated workflows would require force.com development to create and manage. This is particular important e.g. for approval processes. Let’s say that all proposals must be reviewed and approved by certain people in the organization. In SP, this is quite easy to setup with no coding required.
- Choice, SP can be purchased as a hosted app, partner hosted or be on premise , so it is much more flexible in that regard.
- Doesn’t really follow the same metaphor of having sites and portals, in Chatter it is more combined into a single workspace or multiple groups. We see that SP will be more flexible here as well.
- The big unknown is how will you get data out of chatter? If you want to report on that data, or backup that data, or move that data to a different service, how will that be accomplished.
- Harder to integrate with internal applications, like AccountingERP, data warehouse, etc. There are currently accelerators and data connectors for SP that cover a wide range of applications to help ease integration efforts. For Chatter, the only option we see is again using Force.com and custom API’s.
- Finally, long term cost. The costs for SP are very low, about $100 per user. Even if Salesforce “gives it away for free” it requires salesforce crm licenses, which minimally is at least $50/user per month."
The idea of “fun” collaboration in contrast to the “solution helping in business issues” touches but doesn’t it seem to you that business begins to wear funny character turning to social media in their professional goals. As to other stuff of SharePoint 2010, comment is superfluous. Price alone may help it to score.
Nevertheless, the final choice is for the customers. And RFPConnect will be happy to hear voice of SharePoint’s and Chatter`s users in our Product Feedback section on RFPConnect.com. You decide which solutions lead today’s software market!
By Helen Deborg
Where Technology Buyers Meet Technology Sellers 
