Salesforce.com rolls out Chatter 2, the company’s next generation of enterprise social collaboration.

Leveraging the social features popularized by Facebook, Google and Twitter, like profiles, status updates and real-time feeds, Chatter 2 empowers enterprises with a new level of productivity. With Chatter, enterprises can collaborate around more than just documents, and employees can also follow people, business processes and application data.

“The momentum behind Salesforce Chatter is astounding,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. “The excitement we see from the industry and our customers is proof that the feed is the new desktop.”

Since launching Chatter into general availability three months ago, more than 20,000 companies including Hitachi , Misys, Reed Exhibitions and Softbank have deployed Salesforce Chatter. The breakthrough technology has allowed salesforce.com to expand beyond CRM, and bring a new wave of collaboration to employees across the enterprise.

Salesforce.com re-architected all of its apps to use the social, mobile and real-time capabilities of Chatter. Now with Chatter 2, customers can realize tremendous success and new levels of productivity with innovations, including:

●      Chatter Filters: Chatter Filters enables employees to quickly find and focus on only the relevant posts they need at any given time by filtering their Chatter Feed by the groups, people and records they follow.

●      Chatter Topics: With Chatter Topics, employees can associate their updates with other posts and comments on the same topic by using a hashtag (#). Combined with Chatter Search, employees can find updates and comments that match any Chatter topic.

●      Chatter Recommendations: With Chatter Recommendations, employees receive smart, automatic suggestions of colleagues to follow and groups to join. Chatter recommends people based on criteria such as connections in common, number of followers, and management hierarchy. Similarly, public groups are recommended based on their popularity and relevance to that employee.

●      Chatter Desktop: Powered by Adobe® AIR®, Chatter Desktop allows employees to post updates, comments, files and links without opening a web browser, and displays pop-up alerts to instantly notify employees of important updates.

●      Chatter Analytics: With Chatter Analytics, admins can create reports and dashboards on Chatter usage in their company across users as well as their followers, feeds, comments, groups, members, and group comments. This intelligence feature gives visibility into the major contributors and how people are using Chatter, with the ability to segment usage and determine best practices.

●     Chatter Files: Employees can store, update, and share documents, presentations, photos and media files in one place. With Chatter Files, people can now follow files shared by colleagues and receive a Chatter update once a new version is posted so they always have the current version.

●     Dashboard Chatter: Dashboard Chatter empowers employees with the ability to follow and get dashboard updates in their real-time feeds. They can stay tuned to discussions around dashboard data such as sales funnels and close rates, and collaborate with colleagues to get collective insight from the community to speed up and improve decision making.

●     Report Chatter: With Report Chatter, employees can follow reports that are important to them and get updates within their feed and allowing them to be active members of the conversations around critical issues.

●     Activity Chatter: Employees can now track the progress of important tasks and get notifications on calendar and meeting updates. Activity Chatter allows employees to collaborate with colleagues on customer calls and meeting agendas within the task or event record, reducing e-mails and phone calls.

●     Chatter Central: Chatter Central offers employees new to Chatter with a guided checklist of how to get started so they can make the most of their experience.

●     Chatter Search: Chatter Search allows employees to search across every Chatter feed, file, profile, update and comment in real-time to get a comprehensive view on a given keyword or customer.

●     Chatter E-mail Manager: With Chatter E-mail Manager, employees can configure their email notification settings and choose the frequency and scope of emails sent by Chatter.

●     Chatter E-mail Digest: Employees can now receive a daily or weekly Chatter email digest of the latest Chatter posts from their feed or group feeds.