Salesforce offers collaboration beta to elite group

Salesforce.com is offering 100 companies the chance to beta test its collaboration software Chatter - a kind of Facebook for businesses.

Chatter includes elements of social networking with worker profiles, status updates as well as connecting with other networks like Twitter and Facebook. It can also link to other Salesforce products and to Google docs.

The company describes this as "the collaboration cloud" - it sounds to us like an outsourced intranet.

The software is due for a proper launch later this year.

Salesforce has also added visual process design to its development kit - force.com. The company claims this will allow developers to automate business processes by dragging and dropping elements. The software asks questions at each stage and recommends the next step.

The changes are based on technology bought from Informavores, bought by Salesforce last year.

Full statement here. ®