You saw it at Dreamforce, you read about it in the Winter ‘12 release preview and now Chatter Customer Groups are finally here.
Customer Groups allow companies using Chatter to collaborate with people outside their company in a private and secure way. Working with customers, prospects, and partners can get tedious when sharing presentations, multiple versions of documents, marketing videos, and real-time updates. These groups give your teams a secure workspace space to collaborate and share these materials so everyone involved is on the same page throughout the entire customer life cycle:
Work directly with your prospects to collaborate on RFPs, and gather requirements.
Ensure customer success and stay updated on customer progress after winning their business.
Give your customers a direct channel to give product feedback and get support.
Share files and collaborate on joint projects directly with partners.
While we’ve invested a great deal of effort to make customer collaboration easy, there’s nothing more important than the security of your data. So we’ve made sure that the guest users you invite can only see the conversation, files, and people inside the private group’s they’re invited to. They cannot see any of your internal data, like accounts, opportunities or contacts stored in Salesforce or any Chatter information that has specifically shared to their group.
The Customer Groups feature is now available for current Salesforce customers however the ability for Salesforce users to invite guest users is turned off by default. To turn this on a Salesforce administrator must follow these steps:
Click Your Name > Setup > Customize > Chatter > Chatter Settings.
Click Edit.
Select Allow Customer Invitations. (Note: Deselecting this turns off customer invitations. Turning off customer invitations won't delete existing customers of groups that allow customers. Additionally, administrators can still create customer users in Name > Setup > Manage Users > Users.)
Click Save.
For more information on how to set up Customer groups and some best practices check out this episode of Success TV:
