Salesforce.com® For Dummies®, 4th Edition

Chapter 6. Collaborating with Chatter

In This Chapter

• Configuring Chatter

• Finding Chatter

• Updating your profile

• Keeping your status up to date

• Following people and relevant objects

• Joining groups

Every one of us has been the new guy (or gal) at a company at some point in our lives. Even if you received a formal orientation and a review of the organizational chart (a luxury that you shouldn't take for granted), remember still having to meander around finding that person who has the answers? Or maybe you're an old-timer who is extremely busy but always willing to answer a newcomer's questions because you remember how overwhelming it was when you first started.

Organizations possess huge amounts of varying types of knowledge: formal and informal, documented and verbal, current and outdated. Very rarely is knowledge shared in one centralized location. Even when a company is pretty diligent about communicating, the sheer volume of information and the speed with which current information gets outdated can be overwhelming. Using Chatter bridges the gap between sharing useful information and information overload by allowing you to communicate quickly with colleagues as well as keep track of progress and updates on topics as they happen.

In this chapter, we discuss how Chatter works to eliminate all that information chaos by providing a central place where Salesforce users can publish status updates, post and respond to questions, and see recent activity on records to easily collaborate with each ...