I attended the roundtable event yesterday to provide a user and developer perspective on Chatter based on our experiences at FinancialForce.com. The event was attended by some leading industry analysts who heard from different customers about their experiences.

Tim Barker, Salesforce’s VP of Strategy, EMEA, did a great job facilitating the event and provided a round-up of the Chatter Private Beta customer survey results. Parts of this survey have been quoted extensively in the media, but I still find the results compelling. Success metrics include:

- 27% increase in collaboration and team work (pretty hard to measure)

- 19% improvement in Salesforce user adoption

- 3% increase in sales revenue

- 90% indicate they will likely continue to use Chatter in the future.

That’s impressive! We are already sold on the application and our customers are finding that the collaboration it delivers improves customer service dramatically and facilitates sales, but it’s still a difficult concept to sell to anyone that hasn’t tried it. I was asked following my presentation, ‘if we had to pay for Chatter, what business case would we present to the CFO?’ And it struck me when thinking about an answer just how difficult a sell it is, which is why Enterprise 2.0 organizations major on the problems with user adoption. Without trying it out first, I don’t believe you’d even have the basis for a discussion with the CFO. But then you’d need to show where you have/could have lost revenue as a result of not having Chatter and where you have won deals on the back of better collaboration.

These things are difficult to measure. Salesforce.com private beta customers measured the improved time taken to find information, and the increase in close rates among other things. If Salesforce.com could provide a compelling guide to measuring your Chatter success and presenting a business case, I don’t see how it can fail.

Yes, it’s official. Salesforce today announced the availability of Chatter following a private Beta which has already yielded some great feedback. Marc Benioff says that:

“Based on the [experience of the beta trial users], 90 percent of participants surveyed indicated they would recommend Chatter to others. Specifically, these customers reported a 27 percent increase in collaboration and a 22 percent improvement in productivity with Chatter.”

That’s pretty impressive and from our own use of Chatter within FinancialForce.com we’d agree. We’d describe it as a combination between Twitter, Facebook and Google Wave, focused on the enterprise. It has reduced e-mail volumes at FinancialForce, especially the long and fragmented message chains in which it’s sometimes difficult to discern who started a conversation, who is involved in it and what actions need to be taken. It makes it easier to see and respond to things which means you can be more proactive in dealing with issues as they arise because you see them so much earlier.

FinancialForce.com has built Chatter collaboration into FinancialForce Accounting and we see great benefits for innovative customers (as laid out previously). And with the price tag outlined by Salesforce (free to users and $15 per month to non users), now everyone can benefit.

We are in Boston today attending an industry analyst event called The Grape Escape along with Susan Randal from the WiFi Alliance who will talk about the organization’s experiences with FinancialForce Accounting.

The annual event is in its 10th year and is being attended by more than two dozen global technology analysts, some we have met before and some we haven’t. They will hear from different tech vendors about their future strategy and success to date, as well as receiving news announcements and hearing from customers.

At the event, we are making two new announcements. The second I will tell you more about when we announce to the market on Monday. The first has been much anticipated. We have released Summer ’10, the fourth generation release of FinancialForce Accounting. This is significant for a number of reasons.

This new version includes significant new features and a Chatter powered inter-departmental collaboration engine. As the only accounting application that ‘speaks Salesforce’, the collaborative element of this release will set FinancialForce Accounting customers apart.

Customers will benefit from collaboration around business processes like order to cash, which dissolve inter-departmental boundaries that hinder the running of an effective business. The Chatter-enabled FinancialForce application will allow more frequent and effective collaboration around sales opportunities, customer accounts and service issues in order to achieve best pricing and payment structures for big deals or avoid costly payment delays and disputes.

The latest FinancialForce release has been developed with a focus on making accounting processes even more efficient for users. It includes a completely new user interface with an enhanced look and feel, increased depth of functionality related to intercompany accounting and revenue recognition, and a faster pay process.

Click here to view the full announcement and customer endorsements of FinancialForce Accounting. 

We’re attending this year’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston and opening keynotes are currently underway. It is the first time we’ve attended this event and we’ve heard good things about it. It is a gathering place for the growing community of business and IT people bringing enterprise-class collaboration and productivity tools into their organizations. As well as attending panel sessions, we will be meeting with a number of influencers in this space to discuss our own approach to enterprise collaboration and how we see the new generation of tools, like Chatter, breaking down departmental barriers to effective business.

The way we work is changing rapidly and cloud developments have had a big role to play in the way companies procure, implement and use technology. Those that can leverage new tools for more agile and simplified information exchange and collaboration will have a huge competitive edge. Particularly as Cloud has eradicated some of the typical barriers to international expansion. 

Enterprise 2.0 promises to liberate the workforce from the constraints of legacy communication and productivity tools like email. It provides business managers with access to the right information at the right time and takes advantage of the collective intelligence of many. There are huge implications for how businesses will manage customer service in the future for example. Finance will have a pivotal role to play as a source of business intelligence to solve business issues right across the organization.

We’ll be making another related announcement on Thursday at the Grape Escape analyst event being held in Boston on the 17th. More on that later.

To follow Twitter coverage of Enterprise 2.0 search: #e2conf