Business intelligence vendor, QlikTech, will add social capabilities to its QlikView Business Discovery platform, using Chatter Connect from Salesforce.com to up its collaborative credentials. The idea is to allow users to share information within workgroups and teams.

Salesforce.com on Tuesday announced Chatter Free, a version of its social collaboration software that includes a Facebook-like "invite" feature that enables paying users to invite anyone, even non-Salesforce.com customers, to use Chatter.

In a sign of the growing influence of social media in the enterprise, Salesforce has launched Chatter Mobile, a mobile collaboration platform.

Salesforce.com is working on a series of native mobile applications for its Chatter collaboration software, the company announced Wednesday. Supported platforms include Apple's iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, Google Android and Reseach in Motion's BlackBerry.

Salesforce.com on Wednesday announced a private beta program for Chatter, the enterprise collaboration platform first announced last year, positioning it as an alternative to Microsoft SharePoint and IBM Lotus Notes.

You’ve gotta feel for the CIO who has to write a business case to convince his or her board to spend money on new technologies with names like Yammer, Mr Tweet, Pluck, Chatter or Jive. After all, whimsy is only so cool to the chequesigners in multi-billion dollar corporations who quickly follow their tacit approval of anything leading edge with that old-school refrain of “show me the money”. Look past the funky names of today’s social networking tools, however, and chances are there will be enough nifty features to justify the investment.

CRM systems have large and intricate databases that describe customer interaction, and most of the effort goes into recording and managing the ongoing conversation between your firm and the customer. CRM systems have information about prospects, customers, e-mail/phone conversations, sales opportunities, and post-sale support. But look inside most CRM systems, and there's very little information about collaboration among your employees: just basic profile identification information and a dozen settings. In most CRM systems, it's difficult to see the totality of a user's activities: the system's focus is on the customer and the development of a deal, not about the conversations happening between users and their attempts to leverage information across your company.