Of course it could just be that my expectations for using Salesforce and Content seamlessly together are completely unrealistic! What do you think?
Like many other Salesforce users I am very excited about the potential of Chatter and see that it has the potential to become an unrivalled platform for enterprise collaboration. To this end I am investigating ways to make it work effectively for us. Approximately half of the team have full Salesforce licenses already and they will obviously get Chatter and Content automatically when they are released (which I gather will be in the Summer 10 release). The other half don’t really require full visibility of the Salesforce objects or their data feeds but even without this we can see definite benefits to buying them Chatter-only access (which we understand comes with Content) so that they can collaborate on the ‘Content’ associated with Salesforce objects.
Our Chatter-only users do produce a lot of documentation during the lifetime of a project (where a project has a one-to-one relationship to an Opportunity). Thus the Content module would seem to make an almost ideal document repository for the project lifecycle once we add a metadata field to relate a document to the appropriate Opportunity. We were able to quickly add a mandatory field to the Content object linked to the Opportunity Name – which is selected from a lookup on the Opportunity Name. Whilst this works just fine for the Salesforce users it fails miserably for the Chatter-only users! It fails because the Chatter-only users – who don’t have access to the Opportunities – can’t even see the list of Opportunities and thus aren’t able to lookup the Opportunities and so aren’t able to associate their document to the Opportunity! This inability to add the key piece of metadata to the document is, as far as I’m concerned, a fundamental flaw.
Then it gets worse – for all users. The Content filters don’t work for linked fields. So whilst I can filter the workspace to look for File Formats and Authors, etc., I can’t filter it for my primary metadata field – the Opportunity Name. Again this seems to be a fundamental limitation of the capability.
Finally there is one usability issue for Salesforce users. Whilst the Related Content section on the Opportunity object is great for locating documents it should also provide a button to Contribute documents too. Having to navigate away from the Opportunity to the Content module to add a document is yet another illustration of how the developers of the Content module failed to understand how it needed to be joined-up with the rest of Salesforce.
I do understand that in order to differentiate their full and Chatter-only offerings Salesforce don’t want Chatter-only users to be able to see the Salesforce objects and/or get the feeds from them. But extending the limitation to the point where they can’t even access a list of the Opportunities and thus can’t select them as Content metadata seems just too restrictive. Without this capability Salesforce, for us at least, have completely missed the opportunity to provide us with a truly outstanding business collaboration platform.
