Please notify me

We have been using Salesforce Chatter at work. It is an excellent micro-blogging platform with many features. However one thing it lacks is notifications of incoming chatter posts and responses. The only way to get notified is by email. But that is like sending somebody an email, and then calling them up to tell them that you sent them an email.

Salesforce Chatter needs to provide better notifications.  I would prefer to get notified of incoming posts and replies through the push notifications on Android / iOS, that appear in the status bar. Or may be a Chrome extension that shows number of unread chatter posts in the status bar. Or something similar to what Facebook / Google+ provide. 

Gmail and Google Reader notifications in a Chrome Extension

 Google+ notifications in Gmail 

There are many to provide notifications without utilizing email.

Here are some of the interesting ideas posted on the Salesforce IdeaExchange for improving chatter notifications:

https://sites.secure.force.com/success/ideaView?id=08730000000K8JMAA0

https://sites.secure.force.com/success/ideaView?id=08730000000JhxkAAC

https://sites.secure.force.com/success/ideaView?id=08730000000XoYjAAK

https://sites.secure.force.com/success/ideaView?id=08730000000Yq0JAAS

https://sites.secure.force.com/success/ideaView?id=08730000000g1TfAAI

https://sites.secure.force.com/success/ideaView?id=08730000000KcuxAAC

So if any Salesforce engineer is reading this blog, I would like to request them to take a look at the aforementioned ideas and provide a better form of notifications.

Sincerely,
an avid chatter user 

Personal Blogging at Work Increases Productivity. Really????

Susan Adams of Forbes, recently published an article titled, Personal Blogging at Work Increases Productivity . She essentially talks about some study that showed that productivity increased when employees were blogging about personal stuff on their corporate blogs. The article concludes with a rather hasty conclusion that personal blogging is good for productivity.

Good read, but I feel like article makes a very blanket statement with insufficient data. Data from one study with the name of the company and the type of data collected withheld makes me question the the conclusion reached. These types of studies are very dependent on type of industry studied. For example, in travel industry, company wide sharing of personal photos and stories from vacation trips is not only allowed but also encouraged. This is their business. It makes sense for them to share this stuff widely inside their organization and use it to improve their business. So if the study queried a travel industry, for example, than the conclusion would make sense.

I personally don't think sharing personal experiences on a corporate blog is such a good idea. Occasionally it may be fine. For example, if you are using a personal story to tie it to something work related. But that connection has to exist. Pure personal stories would cause the blog subscribers to unsubscribe overtime. Our CIO maintains a internal IT related corporate blog, and I subscribe to the blog. But if he starts talking about this personal life on that corporate blog, without making it relevant to work, I will unsubscribe quickly.

Just my opinion. I would like to hear what others thinks of this.

Google Document List is my new Inbox

In re to Ana's blog titled, Collaboration: death by email

For the past few months I have been living in my Google DocsList instead of my Gmail Inbox. It started out as an experiment, but now I am beginning to appreciate this way of working. I go to my DocsList instead of my Inbox the first thing when I come into the office. I can quickly glance at the documents that have been shared with me for review/input and my all in-progress documents. I can also see what documents have been updated since I last viewed them. This gets me right into the working mode instead of the replying to emails mode.

Now, I don't wanna make it sound like Google Docs addresses all my collaboration needs and that I no longer check my emails. In fact I check my emails regularly - just not the first thing in the morning. I think Google Docs has a long way to go before it can replace my email Inbox. They need to make each content objects (i.e. docs, spreadsheet, sites page, etc.) a social object where people can discuss the content object without going to their email Inbox. Salesforce is making progress in this area by making each uploaded document a record, which may be followed and discussed using Chatter (Salesforce's micro-blogging app). However, Salesforce's Google integration is lacking, to say the least.

I am hoping that Salesforce will improve their integration with Google Docs, and that Google can turn each content object into a social object. Then I will be able to truly stay out of my Inbox. 

tripartite structure of a tag (label)

"[T]he inherent tripartite structure of a tag which potentially informs us a) about the resource being tagged, b) about the identity of the tagger and c) about the interests of the tagger, all combine to define the ternary relationship between them. When this is multiplied by ‘x’ number of tags in a given system, it opens a veritable pandora’s box of application options." - Simon Edhouse

Source
Edhouse, S. (2009, August 21). Who is “Everybody”? Retrieved April 11, 2010, from You're It!: http://tagsonomy.com/index.php/who-is-everybody/