Damian Saunders at FinancialForce.com customer Cogent recently blogged about his experience so far with FinancialForce Accounting. In future blog posts, he promises to convey their experience, what they have learned, what they like, what they don’t like and how it’s working for them.

So far, the experience has been a good one.

He says “FinancialForce emerged as an option right about the time we realized that there was a gaping need to integrate the Company’s financial management with our CRM platform. We didn’t have an issue with our previous application, we were familiar with it, it’s widely used and accepted, and it did everything we needed, except integrate with Salesforce, or not in a way that we wanted it to…

…FinancialForce gave us that integration. In fact FinancialForce is so integrated with Salesforce that the entire application is as one. We now have complete visibility of our Clients, and Vendors, from initial contact all the way through to invoicing and payment.”

We measure our success on the feedback we get from customers and it’s exciting being able to talk to our customers directly. Damian’s enthusiasm and understanding of cloud developments is a pleasure to see. We hope to hear more about his experiences soon and as always encourage feedback and input into future product versions.   

Since we began building Chatterbox and working with Chatter, we have joined the salesforce.com Chatter developers community (DevZone) site where thousands of developers use Chatter to connect with each other, demo new apps, and share and discuss ideas.

We have received some great feedback about our Chatterbox application. One conversation in particular is worth noting.

Ed Schlesinger, a developer at studentforce (@studentforcenow), is excited by the possibilities delivered by Chatterbox. He created a notification system in minutes that works with their student application to notify students of assignments due and can see real value for organisations in Higher Education.

Great example of Chatter in use, the value of Chatterbox and the importance of collaboration.

As we continue to enjoy the benefits of platform integration we have expanded our Email Template examples for Sales Invoices. This means they better reflect the Email output when using the standard functionality, serving as a better starting point if you wish to customize this area of the product. As before they come in two flavors, one with and one without PDF attachment. They also still illustrate a means to add a PayPal button. Finally don’t forget these are also compatible with our Mass Email production functionality as well.

Today, we announced our new Chatter integration and new business collaboration app, Chatterbox, which has received some very positive reactions. We made the announcements at salesforce.com’s Cloudforce2 event in New York.

Comments on the news so far:

“For me this is the first potentially large scale business use case of social computing where the direct integration between applications has genuine business meaning.”

Dennis Howlett on his ZDNet blog

“The big question is what will hook the enterprise on Chatter. Facebook analogies are nice, but real business cases like those surfaced by Roche will ultimately win the day—even if they won’t sound so great in a keynote.”

Larry Dignan, ZDNet

“I’ve always been cautious about social tools that promise to revolutionize the enterprise – but I have to say that an integration between chatter and a third party force.com application really shows the promise these social tools can bring – dragging information kicking and screaming out of the app and to where a user needs it.”

Ben Kepes on cloudave.com

“Will it make it? I think so. Is there still a need for proper strategic planning and follow through for large scale uptake? No question about it. But that’s no different from any other enterprise software category. One things for sure – having the software make it simpler to illustrate business cases out of the box makes it a hell of a lot easier to pass the initial litmus test… Finally, social starts to embrace process.”

Sameer Patel, Pretzel Logic, Enterprise 2.0 blog

“…First, FinancialForce, the ever surprising FinancialForce, released Chatterbox – highly customizable and easily configurable Chatter streams associated with activities that you choose to access and subscribe to… What makes this interesting is that by having a substantial number of conditions that you can apply to the specific Chatter stream, you are filtering out what you don’t want and receiving and responding to what you do want.

Note: FinancialForce is a company to reckon with in the salesforce.com ecosystem. Last week they announced integration with SAP - one of the few in that ecosystem who understands the need to do that.” Paul Greenberg, zdnet.com