<p>Instant messaging tends to be the fastest method of communication within a business, short of picking up the phone. What about using IM to speed up workflows?</p><p>Salesforce.com has done just that with its instant-chat platform Chatter. A function called Approvals in Chatter lets receive approval requests as posts in their Chatter feeds. You can also customise the way the approval request post displays in Chatter by creating unique post templates and associating them with your approval processes.</p><p>A classic example is in sales where a manager needs to sign off on a quote. Many businesses would create a quote in Microsoft Word, save it as a PDF and send it to a manager to print, scan and email back. With Chatter approvals, a user clicks a "for approval" button and the key information is sent in an instant message to the manager with a big Approve button.</p><p>Once a manager clicks approve, the workflow can then generate the quote document, create a task, email a link to a webpage or a webform, send documents to the customer for electronic signatures, or trigger some other step in the process as required.</p><p><a href="http://boxfreeit.com.au/2014/01/31/use-instant-messaging-run-workflow/">Keep reading...</a></p>