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Chatter is the latest in social media for the enterprise from salesforce.com. It is now generally available as of June 22, 2010. When people talk about the benefits of chatter it is generally in the context of a larger enterprise; Phrases like 'break down silos', 'increase communication', 'foster collaboration' are frequently heard. What is not as often discussed is the SMB market. At first blush you may think, why would I use chatter when I can just talk to the person beside me?

I can think of some good uses of Chatter for an SMB.

• For distributed teams, even if they are small, it aids communication.
• Updates on important accounts or deals
• Collaboration on documents
• Changes to important documents
• Changes in company policies
• Notification that an Expense report has been denied or re-imbursed

Some important considerations:

• Chatter can be used to replace email provided all intended recipients are logged into salesforce.com on a regular basis. If it is an urgent issue it does not help if your users do not log in until the next day.
• Don't use 'chats' in addition to email. People get frustrated with getting the same message via different communication avenues. Most don't have time to read things once, never mind multiple times.
• You may need to define the 'chat-iquette' for your company. Some have found that users are 'self policing'. Someone told me of a co-worker responding to an inappropriate status update with 'facebook contacted us about a missing update'. A humorous way to get the point across without being heavy handed.
• Like any new application there will be some learning curves.

Please share your experiences with Chatter 

• If you are not using Chatter, do you plan to?
• If you are using Chatter did you have to defines 'rules of engagement' or were people well behaved?
• Did most of your users intuitively know what to do?
• Are you seeing any correlation between age and usage?
• What other uses can you think of?

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Salesforce provides foreign currency management.  You define the currencies and their decimal places and conversion rate. You need to request explicitly that Salesforce enables the multi-currency feature for your organization. You can enable the Advanced Currency Management yourself, which allows to update the currency rates for a specific date range (minimum: one day).  If you want to use dated exchange rates, they are restricted to  opportunities, opportunity products, and opportunity reports.

You enter the rates in the format of 1 USD = 0.73 EUR (at the recent peak of the Euro it was 1 USD = 0.66 EUR) - assuming that your organization currency is USD. In the financial press, you often find the inverse rate quoted for the EUR in contrast to other currencies.

Assuming, you created the initial EUR rate with 0.66 (1/0.66=1.52) and updated the dated rate to the recent of 0.73 (1/0.73=1.36) and enter a receipt amount of EUR 100 you will see in the Time & Expense Receipt Amount field "EUR 100.00 (USD 151.29)" whereas in the Expense Amount field will show "135.76". The cause is that Salesforce always uses the (single/base) currency rate for display - the dated rates are only used in Opportunities. Consequently, best practice is to update the base currency rate on a regular bases to minimize questions.

Nevertheless, we always use the dated rate (if defined) for converting the foreign currency amounts. The following table shows the different amount fields

You would use the Expense Amount fields in Workflow decisions as they are in the (known) organizational currency. In a single currency environment, you still have the amounts above, but the values, e.g., of the Receipt and Expense Amount would be the same.

When creating expense reports, you can decide in which currency you want to create the report. If the report is in the organization currency, you can add expense items of any receipt currency. If you create a foreign currency expense report, you can add only receipt items of the report currency.

You can also update the exchange rates on a report and currency basis. Example would be that you want to use the currency rate from your credit card. Last but not least, you can update the report item expense amount directly. Example here is that you want to enter the exact amount on your credit card statement.  Note that in the credit card statement import, the amounts are imported as converted amounts, the original foreign currency receipt amounts are not available in the statement import. You can secure the ability to update currency exchange rates by profile, e.g. allow only managers to update them.  You can also report of the actual conversion rate to detect abuse.

The reimbursement of expenses is in the currency of the expense report.

Multi-currency management is always a challenge and we make it as painless as possible in Salesforce.

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