For me, the word sounds old, but the products and services coming from Chatter.com, a product of Salesforce, is anything but. It is a business collaborative tool that leverages various social media-type platforms to present to companies a familiar but totally flexible environment.

There are a number of collaborative tools in the market to help companies work more efficiently, I've worked with several of them, but none so entrenched in the new technologies of mobile devices and cloud computing as Chatter, which at the same time is totally free of cost.

Chatter is strictly for internal use by a company because the permissions are based upon e-mail addresses, all of which must share the same company domain name. In this way, Chatter allows you to control access to various levels and appoint administration people without having to worry about security or any of the “conversations” going outside the company.

Related: Read “Cloud Commuting Evolves.”

In a similar manner that people use Facebook to connect with old friends or school alumni, Chatter helps you connect with coworkers within your own company, regardless of location, to share business information securely and in real time.

Each employee within a Chatter account creates a profile for themselves, which will include contact information, a photo, an “About Me” section, a Chatter feed, a list of followers and a list of people being followed, much like a Twitter account.

You can invite other colleagues from your company to join Chatter. This comes in handy if you're part of a group activity in which all of the participants are not yet part of Chatter.

Chatter groups let you collaborate on specific projects with certain people. It's much like groups in LinkedIn, in which your request to join needs to be approved or in other platforms like Quora (a wiki-like platform for finding answers to questions) where you need to be invited by an existing member.

Chatter groups can be either public or private (remember, “public” still only means public to employees of the company) and anyone can create a group.

With a group in place, the collaboration can begin. With Chatter, you can upload a file and share it with a specific person, all members of your group or anyone else within Chatter for feedback. Group members can “follow” the file so they are notified when a change is made and a new version is uploaded. Because Chatter tracks history, you can view all previous iterations of the file.

Because all collaboration within a single company account is across Chatter, you can use the global search function to find certain topics and all the discussions and work being done.

Similar to other social networking platforms, Chatter makes “recommendations” to you on people or groups you might want to follow. A lot of it is based upon what people or groups you currently follow and what other people like you also follow.

Indicating people or groups you'd like to follow is easy and much like Twitter; it's just a matter of clicking on a “+” plus sign.

Because Chatter is based on a flexible platform in which a social media environment is the norm, you can collaborate over a desktop application and a mobile phone app, both of which are free. Currently, Chatter's mobile app is only available for the Apple iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch with iOS 4.0 or higher and BlackBerry devices with BlackBerry 5 OS or higher.

Additional functionality makes the collaborative process even easier. For example, use of the “@” symbol in front of a person's name will alert them to a particular post, regardless of whether that person is following that discussion thread. This allows people within the discussion to loop in others who have a specific knowledge or value.

If you're looking for a collaborative tool for use within your agency, Chatter doesn't have any cost of entry and might be just what you need. There is a lot of information on the Chatter.com website, so spend an hour or so going through the website, watching the videos and understanding what you can and cannot do with it.

From a security perspective, if an employee leaves the company for whatever reason, his or her account can be deactivated. This prevents that person from accessing anything on the site (once their company e-mail address has been deactivated) but leaves all of their previous posts and comments as part of the collective knowledge base.

Are you too big or too small?

There are several questions to ponder if you're considering implementing Chatter within your agency. First is a question around the tipping point. What is the minimum number of people within a company/organization that should be reached in order for it to make sense? If you are a 5- or 10-person agency, you probably don't need a collaboration tool. Gathering around the water cooler or at regular team meetings will most likely suffice.

If, on the other hand, you have several locations and a 100-person staff, Chatter could be a great way to build a cohesive working team. Sharing a knowledge base of information and experience across an agency that has grown through mergers and acquisitions, for example, might be just what is needed to get everyone on the same page and heading in the same direction.

Also consider the frequently overlooked reality that sometimes we are not “plugged in” to the Internet. Does Chatter work in a disconnected world? The fact that file collaboration is not based on multiple people editing the same document, checking files out and in when edits are completed, makes a disconnected environment less of a concern, I would imagine.

I can't say whether Chatter or any other collaborative tool is suitable for your agency. I will tell you that when I began looking into this, it definitely had a bit of the “coolness factor,” and I regretted having too small of a company to make its use worthwhile. But in today's technology environment, coolness has little sway because it seems every day another technology comes to the foreground that's way cooler.

The business reason will always be the tipping point for deciding on adopting a new technology.