Well, the 2011 holiday season is in the bag and everyone — including me — is wandering back toward reality, scratching our heads, and trying to answer one question: how do we kick 2012 off with a bang?

First things first: please go get a cup of your morning beverage of choice.  My coffee and I will wait.

All set?  OK!

Back before this season was a memory, deep in the heart of that week right before everyone disappeared, the good people behind Salesforce Labs released a new app: ChatUp.  Missed it?  Don’t worry, that’s the reason behind this post.

Before I get to the app, I want to highlight how it was developed, as it was a bit unusual.  It all started when a sales engineer in Australia created what we refer to as a demo component.  Demo components are by nature quick and ugly, but they do a great job illustrating an idea.  I saw it on Chatter, and made a comment that it would certainly be cool labs app.  From there, a sales support engineer in San Francisco picked it up and implemented some test classes.  There was some back and forth between the two developers and it was ready for security review.  Once it passed review, a customer success manager in Chicago picked it up and helped refine the documentation.

This was truly a cooperative effort.  Troy Sellers, Samantha Ready and Ryan Klein: thank you for your work on this app!  Incidentally, as far as I can tell, these three people have never met or worked with each other before.  They just wanted to see this app come to life.  Fantastic!

Now let’s talk about the app for a minute.

ChatUp helps implement conditional auto-posting to Chatter from a child object to its parent.  The package comes with two examples: the first is posting from Opportunity to Account and the second is posting from Case to Account.  It also works with any custom objects and includes detailed instructions for how to configure it appropriately.

  • Need to post to the Account when an Opportunity reaches a certain stage?
  • Need to post to the Account when a Case comes in via a certain source?
  • Or as the example in the docs show, do you need to post to a Project when an Expense has a certain type on it?

All of these are good examples of how you can use ChatUp.

Check out the app, and be sure to give it a try in your sandbox or developer edition.

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