Distinction between SF2SF, Communities, Chatter

Question

What is the difference between Salesforce to Salesforce, Communities, and Chatter? There seem to be many overlapping features. What makes each of these distinct from the other? What would be distinct use cases? How is record access and sharing distinct in each? Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Salesforce to Salesforce (S2S)

This feature allows two organizations to share their records with each other. I believe this is designed more around companies that use multiple orgs themselves (e.g. orgs for different divisions or geographic entities that then push their accounts and opportunities to a parent org for reporting). This can also be a general data integration pattern between two or more orgs where it would be too difficult to simply merge the orgs together.

https://developer.salesforce.com/page/An_Introduction_to_Salesforce_to_Salesforce

Communities

Customer and Partner Communities are technologies that allow an org to expose some of its data to customers (B2C) or partners (B2B) using Sites.com, Force.com Sites, and good ol' visualforce/apex. Unlike S2S mentioned above, this is not a inter-company type integration but rather a way for a business to market to and engage their customers and partners directly from the Salesforce platform rather than developing user-facing apps on separately hosted servers.

http://www.salesforce.com/communities/overview/

Chatter

Chatter is the 'social media' piece of Salesforce product. Employees can engage in Chatter to post messages, links, and share files. This is similar to about any social media sharing technology known to the interwebs like Facebook, G+, Twitter, SharePoint, etc. With Communities discussed above, it is easy for customers and partners and a business' employees to collaborate and communicate with each other. This is not a data integration pattern like S2S.

http://www.salesforce.com/chatter/overview/