What Is Salesforce Chatter And Its Benefits?

Salesforce Chatter is the largest enterprise social network that empowers employees to connect, collaborate, share data, exchange files, and expertize all in the real-time. It helps to increase efficiency, drive productivity and innovation across departments. From sales to marketing and management departments, the entire Company may use Chatter to tear down communication barriers and succeed as a team.

Salesforce Chatter is the major communication platform that connects departments that have never communicated in the past. It is an excellent resource for Salesforce user looking for powerful software solutions like ERP to Salesforce integration for example. If you are using Salesforce Chatter for the first time, the best way to learn Chatter is through basics then you may move to the advanced topics. Let us start our discussion with popular Salesforce Chatter features and how are they helpful for Salesforce users.

4 Popular Salesforce Chatter Features

1). Chatter Groups

Chatter groups are created for the project members, direct team, or your entire business. It comes with multiple benefits with the most important collaboration among users with common interests for a particular subject.

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The person who creates the Chatter group is the group owner automatically. He can assign one group manager too who has similar permissions as you. The only difference is that the manager is not permitted to change the group owner to delete that particular group. It is possible to join any Chatter group if the group owner or group manager invites you. It helps you to stay in touch with other members and analyze the group activities when required.

2). Chatter Thanks

One of the most interesting features that come with Chatter is Chatter Thanks. It helps you to drop a quick thanks note to any of the colleagues when needed. You just have to go to the Quick Actions bar, select Thanks option, type name of the colleague you want to drop a Thank note then click Change Badge option.

As soon as you click on the option, you are given a space to type your message, select the audience, and share the message. It is an easy feature to use really comes handy when you want to applaud someone in the Company for a great job.

3). Email Digest

Once you join the Chatter group, you start receiving email notifications for multiple activities within Chatter. It may be annoying in the beginning but don’t worry as you can always control the frequency of email notifications that you want to receive. Also, you can set the limit for notifications you want to receive by using Email Settings options.

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4). Quick / Global Actions

Based on the org set up, you have multiple actions available on the chatter tab. The most popular standard quick actions are File, Link, Poll, Post, thanks, Questions etc. The best thing about these actions is that they are completely customizable and can be modified using Global Publisher Layouts. These options are available in Enterprise, unlimited, Database, and Developer editions.

Collaboration Features in Salesforce Chatter

Salesforce Chatter is a great internal collaboration application that is available readily and adds on to its benefits. It helps to set up transparent communication across multiple departments within a Company. Salesforce Chatter offers a wider range of collaboration features that can be used with any application built on the Force.com platform. With Salesforce Chatter, users and data may provide a stream of live updates which enhances the usage of the application and the related data.   Also, you may add social features instantly like profiles, feeds for the real-time, status update for any force.com application using Chatter technologies. Let us discuss major collaboration features in Salesforce chatter that are easy to incorporate into your application.

• Profiles: Each user has a visible profile page that contains the complete information about the users with its profile picture.
• Status Update: Users have the flexibility to follow other users and data records and be notified for the fields changes and the status update.
• Real-Time Feeds: it is possible to access activities through feeds. You may access an aggregation of all activities that you follow and drill into particular activity within a specific record.
• Data Model: Developers are free to use the data model for querying and creating status update programmatically.
• Sharing or Security Model: Salesforce chatter supports the sophisticated security or sharing model built into the force.com platform and makes ensure the user can see the content only what he wants to see.

Moving ahead, let us discuss what is Salesforce Chatter REST API and how is it different from more Salesforce APIs.

What is Salesforce Chatter REST API?

Salesforce Chatter REST API is generally used to display groups, profile, status update, real-time feeds etc, especially in mobile applications. Chatter REST API also gives programmatic access to files, topics, notifications, recommendations and more. Chatter REST API is similar to any other API like Facebook or Twitter but it exposes Salesforce features beyond Chatter. It is generally used to create custom experiences in the Salesforce. Here are considerations when should you choose Salesforce Chatter REST API.

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• Chatter REST API is good to build a mobile application.
• It can be used to integrate a third-party web app with Salesforce to notify groups of users about events.
• It helps to display a feed on the external system like intranet site, once users are authenticated well.
• It helps to integrate actionable feeds with third-party sites. For example, one application posts Chatter items to Twitter whenever post include the #tweet hashtag.
• It helps to create simple games to interact with feeds for notifications.
• It helps to create a custom and branded skin for Chatter for your organization.

With this discussion, you know when to use Salesforce Chatter REST API for your application. Now let us see some of the major differences among Chatter REST API and Salesforce REST APIs.

• Data is well structured to render on websites and mobile devices.
• The returned information is localized to the time zone and language of users.
• The modified values that are tracked within a feed are returned as value-pair representations.
• The rate limiting for Chatter REST API is set as per user, per application, per hour etc. The rate limit for simple Salesforce API is defined by the organization.
• If needed, Salesforce REST API and Chatter REST API can be used together when needed.

Final Words:

Chatter is the enterprise collaboration platform from Salesforce and a CRM vendor. It can be used as a Company intranet and employee directory. Each employee has a profile page where complete details for an employee is given with its image, reporting manager, job responsibilities, location, and how to contact the employee etc. Employees may follow page or document both to collaborate on sales opportunities, campaigns, tasks, projects, service cases etc.

Chatter allows users to manage feeds and control how notifications are received.  Developers may incorporate Chatter features to applications built on Force.com platform. Salesforce offers chatter in desktop or mobile versions. To know more on Salesforce Chatter and how to use it with your application, learn it practically at JanBask Training and get certified in Salesforce to gain the right expertise.

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