Still, the Messenger capabilities will flesh out Chatter's existing features for file-sharing, groups and activity streams.

Chatter Messenger was inspired, like many Salesforce.com features, by suggestions customers made on the vendor's community website. Customers vote on and rank submitted ideas, and some of the most popular ones eventually end up in the product.

A groundswell of negative user feedback on the community site recently to charge separately for some long-requested analytics capabilities for the CRM system.

Meanwhile, the Summer '12 update is set to include a wide range of new features apart from Chatter Messenger.

One is Known Issues, a website that features a "subset of the issues Salesforce.com is aware of and, in many cases, working to fix," the notes state. This feature comes as no surprise given the increased pressure cloud vendors like Salesforce.com face in the wake of high-profile service outages, which can have a serious impact on their customers' ongoing operations.