Cloud Computing: Musings from within Regulated Industries

Ah, summertime. Warm days at the beach, cool nights sipping iced tea on your front porch and...the Salesforce.com Summer 13 Release!

It's that time of year again! So, go and get your sandboxes ready, because it's almost time to play with the Spring 13 release of Salesforce.com.

Recently, we authored a blog post entitled, "Is Salesforce.com Chatter FINRA Compliant?" In that blog post, we discussed whether or not Salesforce Chatter, as a form of social media, satisfies FINRA regulations. To summarize, Salesforce Chatter is not FINRA compliant. But FINRA is not the only regulatory organization that provides rules around electronic communications use and compliance. Organizations that are subject to Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA or the FDA should also take note. Here's what you need to know, regardless of the regulatory entity that governs your organization.

Salesforce.com Chatter is an excellent collaboration tool. It's more efficient than email and gives one the capability to search or browse within a single location to find all content on a certain topic. It enables employees that are based in different geographies to communicate and collaborate very easily. You can even expose select Chatter feeds to your clients or customers to interact on, say, a support case. But all of this "social" communications-based functionality begs the question: Is Salesforce.com Chatter FINRA compliant?

Salesforce.com published the Winter 13 Release Notes last week and, as usual, within it many great enhancements can be found. In particular, Salesforce.com has focused on furthering its investment in Chatter for Winter 13, including some really neat functionality, many of which customers have requested.

In this blog post, we'll discuss what has recently been defined as "internal" social media, how it differs from the more traditional and widely adopted "external" social media, and how and why regulatory requirements apply to both internal and external of social media, when in use by regulated organizations.

As you may know, all Salesforce.com production orgs will upgrade to the Summer 12 Release in the next 2-3 weeks, depending on which instance you employ (NA1, NA2, etc.). 

Included the Summer 12 release, there exist some code enhancements which require small modifications to the Archive for Chatter application.

Ah, Salesforce.com. Ever evolving and extending far beyond cloud computing and your father's CRM. It truly is great, but if you aren't careful, new Salesforce.com releases can sting a bit - especially if you've build your own applications on top of the platform.

With the advent of Salesforce.com Chatter, social media and more collaborative means of communicating are beginning to emerge within organizations of all sizes. Say goodbye to searching multiple internal repositories of information; Chatter enables the savvy organization to centralize all forms of communication and related files around a central topic.

Companies that operate in certain industries such as Financial Services are subject to regulatory requirements that sometimes make it difficult to implement technologies without having ancillary solutions in place. Regulations outlined by FINRA, the SEC, SARBOX and HIPAA often require all forms of electronic communications to be journaled, indexed, retained, and discoverable on read-only (WORM) media for a specified number of years.