Salesforce.com has introduced a freemium version of its enterprise collaboration product Chatter.
Chatter Free will use an invitation model and any Chatter user can invite any colleague to Chatter, even if that colleague isn't already a Chatter user, according to Klint Finley from ReadWriteEnterprise.
Chatter Free is free for all colleagues of Salesforce.com (News - Alert) users. The company notes that it will launch Chatter.com in February, 2011 and it will be free for anyone.
Although the company has not made clear yet the limitations of the free version but has pointed out Chatter free features that include Profiles, Status Updates, Real-Time Feeds, File Sharing, Groups, Filters, Invitations, Chatter Mobile and Chatter Desktop.
"Salesforce is basically saying that its 2,000 sales reps can't get the job done and that they need to copy Yammer's (News - Alert) model. This is like Goliath dropping his sword and armor and chasing after David with a sling-shot," said Yammer CEO David Sacks. "Other people have tried to copy our model, but aren't showing similar growth. Salesforce may find that it's more difficult than it looks."
Read a related article at TMCnet “Salesforce.com Kicks Off World's Largest Cloud Computing Event Ever, Dreamforce 8: Collabor8.”
The enterprise cloud computing company has reported record turnout to Dreamforce 8: Collabor8, Salesforce.com’s eighth annual user and developer conference. In its keynote, salesforce.com unveiled its vision for Cloud 2 across all six clouds - Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Salesforce Chatter Collaboration Cloud, Jigsaw Data Cloud, the Force.com Platform Cloud and the new Database.com, the world's first enterprise cloud database.
Anuradha Shukla is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.Edited by Juliana Kenny