Sonoma Partners Release Free Vibe Community Edition to Coincide with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, Encourage Social CRM

After Microsoft launched the 2011 edition of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, Sonoma Partners decided to mark the occasion by offering the newest release of its Vibe social CRM tool for free to all Dynamics CRM 2011 customers.

The public launch of Vibe in June 2010 received strong interest from the Dynamics CRM community - Microsoft's own Dynamics CRM Online team reportedly uses it - in part due to its resemblance in both function and timing to the much-hyped Salesforce.com Chatter tool. And in part the interest arose from the obvious potential of Vibe's approach to creating a Dynamics CRM-based enterprise social application with implications for improving business productivity and collaboration.

Sonoma Partners point out that their initial versions of Vibe were developed internally to scratch their own itch for useful collaboration and enterprise visibility as their own Dynamics CRM consulting firm grew across the US in multiple offices and time zones.  They acknowledge, however, that the popularity of Chatter helped validate their view on the importance of Vibe.

"We believe in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM community, and therefore we want to offer Vibe to the community an alternative to Salesforce.com's Chatter," the company said recently in a statement.

In the Q&A that follows, Ryan Toenies, Vice President of Sales, Sonoma Partners shares important details about Vibe with MSDynamicsWorld.com:

Q. What is the history of Vibe? When was it first developed?

A. The application was developed a couple years ago. Today it's on its third major revision. It started as an internal project for Sonoma Partners. Our business started ...