A couple of months ago SAP bought SuccessFactors and a week or two later Salesforce bought Rypple. We blogged about SuccessFactors here and we mentioned that we had discontinued it in favour of Rypple. We like Rypple, and we’ve implemented it’s more modern look-and-feel with some relief.
With SuccessFactors we did kinda feel we had been dragged into something that wasn’t as edgy as we were led to believe. You know those barber shops where there are posters in the window showing young impossibly handsome George Clooney types with textured hairstyles? – but when you sit in the chair you quickly realise you’re going to look like a US Marine when the ‘implementation phase’ kicks off.
Rypple isn’t quite so bellicose. However, one of the things we did start to struggle with was it’s interplay with Salesforce. You see, both Salesforce chatter and Rypple encourage Facebook wall type conversation streams within their product. In Salesforce you are often talking about Opportunities and Accounts, in Rypple you are often congratulating people for doing a fine piece of work.
Well we often have people do fine work that relates to specific Salesforce-tracked Opportunities and it became a bit puzzling to understand where to tell one’s colleagues about their performance – should we enter into Rypple or enter into Salesforce. I blogged here about how difficult it is to build momentum with an internal blogging tool such as our Yammer experience. Now that we’ve been so successful with Chatter, it would be a shame to see our success diluted because we have two separate platforms, and our team became confused.
So Rypple themselves came up with a neat solution, and that was to add a thank-you button on our Salesforce opportunities. Salesforce connects via an API to Rypple – so now we can enter text into a person’s Rypple document whilst remaining in the system that drives the majority of our working day. In the image here, you can see Rypple pop to the forefront of the (greyed) Salesforce screen. Neat Solution and a great way to get better Rypple adoption.
I’m sure Salesforce have some great ideas as to how the Rypple functionality will be fully integrated into their platform and we at ProQuest can’t wait to see it.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
That does sound like a neat integration! I am all about saying thank you! That goes a long way and should certainly be big part of all of our work days! We’re big proponents of thanks at WorkSimple (http://www.getworksimple.com), too! Like Rypple, we’re built around creating social goals, giving and receiving feedback. Oh and we really like high fives. Um, up high?? Don’t leave me hanging.
thanks Jocelyn!