Yammer vs Chatter

When it comes to providing your staff with a centralized communication hub that is both private and easily accessible, two great choices are Yammer.com and Chatter.com. Both are well designed and work flawlessly to do exactly what they claim to do, allow for web-based collaboration among various work teams. Create groups, subscribe to people you work with, share files and important updates without having to address specific individuals to make sure the right people are kept in the loop, and help staff develop a fuller understanding of the people they work with, including their skills and activities.


Both services also offer free options, with the Chatter private social network remaining free at any usage level. If you want any sort of administrative control (such as being able to delete users or their comments/posts) you will need to utilize one of the paid plans at Yammer, while Chatter offers that control by default within the free service. In order to sign up, a new user need only enter an email address on your company's domain. With Chatter you can also invite customers to collaborate with their own email addresses, though their access is much more limited than for staff, as you would hope.


Other differences between the two networks are that:

• * Yammer already offers instant messaging, which won't be coming to Chatter until the Summer 2012 Salesforce.com release;
• * Neither allows the addition of new profile fields, but Yammer has almost twice as many by default;
• * Salesforce.com CRM users will benefit from being able to push record updates and other CRM events to the Chatter feed stream, so that staff can easily stay on top of important deals and relationships;
• * In Chatter you can reply to email updates of posts or messages and have the reply post directly to the feed without your needing to log in;
• * Yammer allows the posting of videos that play within the page they are posted to without your needing to download the video to view it.

These are primary differences between the two services. There are also some minor differences between the two, but for the most part they are very similar. The decision for me was made by the lack of any security control whatsoever with Yammer. That is a deal-breaker in my assessment, but if you decide to go with one of the paid Yammer plans (which begin as low as $5/user/month) you do gain security control. In that case I lean toward Yammer because of the additional features, such as inline video viewing, polls, additional profile info capture, etc. But if you have a CRM you do well to link the social community to that, in which case though Yammer allows some integration, Chatter comes tightly integrated with its CRM.

In the final assessment, you will probably be quite happy with either of these services, which can make email inboxes with important messages buried beneath mountains of trivia a thing of the past for your workers. Whether from your laptop, desktop, tablet, or mobile device, you can stay connected to the information flow essential to your performance.

What's Yext?

Yext aims to answer the question, "What's next for the Yellow Pages?" now that the concept of finding businesses and goods has moved online, making that old paper doorstop an anachronism. The Yext "PowerListings" product allows businesses to keep their information correct and seamlessly synced across the web.

Want to update your listing with a new phone number just once and have it show up on Yelp, Citysearch, Google and over 30 more sites? How about correcting an address error found on several sites without having to find and edit them one by one, knowing you haven't missed any simply because some sites get your company address right? With PowerListings, you can log into your company's PowerListings account to update listings whenever you want, and watch the updates occur at blazing speeds across the entire webosphere.

Ensure that your business comes up as a local listing whenever someone in your area searches for the products or services you offer. Verify your contact information across the web to make sure those who have already heard of you actually know how to find you. Be a part of the logical evolution of what regional Yellow Pages have meant to us all for so long, reliably accurate information that helps consumers connect with the businesses they want to do business with.

Yext already has over 40,000 businesses using its service. Is yours next?

Updated Cross-Object Workflow in Salesforce.com

If you have been using the Enterprise edition or above for the Salesforce.com CRM system, you have probably encountered some frustration trying to create the workflow field updates you want most. That is because the platform is primarily set up for workflow to only occur within one object's records, or from parent to child. Even moving from parent to child (e.g. Account to Opportunity) the platform never sees that the parent record has been edited to run the workflow field update on the child until you edit the child record also, which is why we created Aspira XObject as a free app that automates the triggering of that workflow.

That app is quite popular, and has helped a lot of SFDC users, but there is still the problem of not being able to send field updates from child records to parent records (e.g. Opportunity to Account). After years of Idea Exchange requests, this feature will now be available with the Spring '12 release! And that's not all. See below for all the workflow changes coming soon, as supplied by the official release notes FAQ.

"With Spring ‘12, cross-object field updates in workflow rules and approval processes now support standard objects. Both custom-to-standard and limited standard-to-standard relationships are supported.

Custom Object to Standard Object

You can use cross-object field updates for custom objects that are children of certain standard objects in a master-detail relationship. The standard objects which support cross-object field updates are:

• Account

• Asset

• Campaign

• Case

• Contact

• Contract

• Contract Line Item

• Entitlement

• Opportunity

• Order

• Question

• Quote

• Service Contract

• Solution

Standard Object to Standard Object

You can now use cross-object field updates for standard objects that are children of standard objects in a master-detail relationship. However, only a few standard-to-standard relationships are supported. Case Comments updating Case and Email updating Case were supported previously. The new relationships that we've opened up are:

• Opportunity Product updating Opportunity

Note: Cross-object field updates to a parent opportunity's Amount and Quantity fields only work if the opportunity has no opportunity products associated with it.

• Opportunity updating Account—Supported for both business accounts and person accounts.

Field Updates for Encrypted Custom Fields

With Spring '12, we've expanded the reach of workflow field updates to include encrypted custom fields. Note, however, that if you try to use a formula to set an encrypted custom field's new value, the encrypted custom field isn't available in the formula editor as a resource.

Workflow Field Updates Can Retrigger Workflow Rules (aka Cascading workflow)

We added a new checkbox option to workflow field updates that allows you to select whether you want a field update to trigger a re-evaluation of all workflow rules on the object.

Here’s how it works:

• If the field update changes the field’s value, all workflow rules on the associated object are re-evaluated. Any workflow rules whose criteria are met as a result of the field update will be triggered.

• If any of the triggered workflow rules result in another field update that’s also enabled for workflow rule re-evaluation, a domino effect occurs, and more workflow rules can be re-evaluated as a result of the newly-triggered field update. This cascade of workflow rule re-evaluation and triggering can happen up to five times after the initial field update that started it.

• In a batch update, workflow is only retriggered on the entities where there is a change.

• Only workflow rules on the same object as the initial field update will be re-evaluated and triggered.

• Only workflow rules that didn’t fire before will be retriggered.

• Cross-object workflow rules and time-based workflow rules aren’t candidates for re-evaluation.

• Cross-object field updates that cause a field value to change don’t trigger workflow rule re-evaluation on the associated object."

Important Note: Note that cross-object workflow changes described above apply only to objects connected by master-detail relationships, not those connected by lookup fields. Also, standard-to-custom object workflow is still not supported, and neither is some frequently desired standard-to-standard workflow (such as Task to Contact/Opportunity/Case, Campaign Member to Lead/Contact, etc.) That said, it is still possible to either use our app to allow lookup relationship based workflow automation (parent to child) or have a custom coded solution built for you in a week's time (child to parent workflow).

Bottom line, if you have a business case for cross-object workflow, between the new Spring release functionality and AspiraTech's workflow expertise, we can get you to a perfect fit solution in short order.

Read the full Salesforce.com CRM Spring '12 Release Notes for details on workflow and other important changes.