Chatter was a collaboration platform with integration into the business process and the ability to conduct actions like approving expense reports and creating support cases from the activity feed itself. It was acquired by Salesforce and is currently discontinued.
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Google Chat
Score 7.9 out of 10
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Google Chat, formerly Hangouts Chat, is a collaboration tool competing with Slack, designed to make it easy for teams to be able to get their work done in one place. From direct messages to group conversations, Chat helps teams collaborate, and with dedicated, virtual rooms to house projects over time — plus threaded conversations — Chat helps users track progress and follow up tasks. Chat currently supports 28 languages and each room can support up to 8,000 members.
[Chatter] is the tool that makes our relations stronger. It provides advanced ways of communication. I have trained my many team members because of the easy features and functions of this tool, It is very user-friendly. Give it a try if you want to improve your relations with your customers. It will surely enhance the productivity of your organization.
Well suited for businesses of all sizes. HOWEVER, I would say keep the chat groups limited at the departmental level, ensure that your moderator or the individual responsible for the group keeps it on topic, and have your IT team monitor it from time to time. Google Chat gets used so much in our organization that we have rules and regs in our Employee Handbook regarding its proper use (and when used PROPERLY, it can be very effective).
Chatter provides us with a live internal conversation for all to see without the noise that other mediums have i.e. e-mail.
One of the main features that really works well is the 'Groups' that you can join. We have multiple groups set up to not only distribute procedural changes and communicate news etc, but also have conversations around upcoming tasks in the months ahead.
Chatter works really well in instances where we need to look over historical conversations that have been had and the sentiment of those conversations with our shareholders, often using hashtags.
Groups does not have the private messaging functionality. Since most collaboration takes place in Groups, private messaging would allow for relevant conversations to be contained and not reside separately.
On a Group index page, there are two boxes for Information and Description. These content types seem redundant. You could replace both with a content type called About the Group. There could also be another box listing the Owners for quick reference.
On the main index page, the newsfeed has the same look and feel of most social platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Jive, IBM Connections, SharePoint. There could be an alternate display of tiles that shows People you interact with most frequently, Files you access most often, most recent Topics, etc. The display could be something like Delve in Microsoft Office 365.
On the main index page in the right rail, it would be useful to have the ability to incorporate RSS feeds to gather outside content. Many departments heavily leverage RSS feeds to compile competitive intelligence and cultivate general awareness.
For user profiles, can we combine Feed and Overview into one consolidated view? It would save users a click to find relevant information about the person. Also, the Contact module should also have the person's phone number for convenience.
The Files feature does not allow for real-time, concurrent document editing. You have to download the document, make your edits, save, and then upload a new version, which only allows for one editor at a time.
Chatter can fulfill at least 85-90% of our business requirements in an easy-to-use platform. Usability is a key requirement and we have had our share of bad usability experiences. In our experience, even the most novice users were able to pick up Chatter in a relatively short amount of time with little/no assistance.
The updates, support, general reviews on Google Chat are great everywhere. The development of the features is ongoing and this adds a great value to Google as a big company in the market. Other applications are limiting communication while Google Chat is allowing communication to grow. It is very easy to use it and teach others how to use Google Chat.
It is easy to use but the impact of it feels like it is a bit antiquated. It does not feel collaborative and real time. Chatter is more akin to email versus Slack or Hangouts where it feels like problems are being solved as you are communicating.
It's not perfect. There are occasional glitches, drop-outs, and it takes a bit to get everything loaded and working. But it is significantly better than Zoom or GoToMeeting when you're in instructional settings. I know my teacher friends here like it and the administrators and parents seem to be satisfied too.
If I ever came to a situation where i needed help they do a very good job of getting back to us quickly to explain our error or why we are not seeing something. The support is quick to help provide groups or teams if you seek. Fortunately it is user friendly so I rarely need support
I have not needed to contact the support folks for Google Hangouts Chat, so I can't speak to this with any accuracy. The online instructions are fairly clearly written, so it is fairly intuitive to start with. I did not feel the need to use the support people anyway.
Skype is used more for audio calls. Chatter is used to track updates on items of interest in Salesforce. Chatter is deeply integrated with other Salesforce products. No other competing products come close. Slack is a traditional project management tool. So it does not compete with Chatter. Because of its close integration with Salesforce, it is a unique tool for Salesforce users.
Prior to Google Hangouts, our company used Spark. Spark was not integrated into our email, therefore it couldn't be easily accessed in the same browser. With Spark we also couldn't search our emails for keywords in a conversation, searching had to be done manually. The one feature I enjoyed about Spark was a request to get a user's attention: If I had an urgent question and I wanted to ensure the recipient saw my message/question, I would request their attention and the message screen would pop up on their screen.
