Latest Enterprise Collaboration News & Articles

Forrester Research refers to social activities streams which connect enterprise social tools to adjacent collaboration, content, portal, and productivity applications in the environment as a “bridge” to “socially enabled” enterprise applications. Evaluating leading vendors in the current activities stream marketplace, Forrester has placed Yammer, Salesforce and Tibco at the head of the list, with VMware (Socialcast) and Neudesic cited as “strong performers".

Google App maker BetterCloud has debuted a new domain management tool to go along with a collaboration tool it released in February, and the company raised US$ 2.2 million in new seed funding to keep building even more.

The landscape for social platforms is a rich one, and IT professionals are using a number of approaches to deploy social communication and collaboration features in an enterprise environment.

It may be hard to imagine an ultrahip jazz maestro like the late Miles Davis immersing himself in the world of social software and collaboration, but according to a new report from Gartner, some pretty cool things are happening in this space. In "Cool Vendors in Social Software and Collaboration", Gartner identifies harmon.ie, MangoApps, Podio, Social Intelligence, and SocialLogix as being among a "broader set of interesting vendors to watch in social software and collaboration".

Jive Software adds a couple of new features to its Social Business Platform today. It's about what matters and working anywhere. Oh, and there's a free trial in there as well.

Atlassian's Confluence collaboration platform picked up a nifty new tool today with the announcement of iRise visualization technology integration.

Earlier this month we pointed out that Yammer has moved past basic social networking and into primary productivity tool territory. But that news was nothing compared to its latest announcement — universal search.

If you were to look at the business pages of any major newspaper in the past couple of days, you’d swear IT was in meltdown. The reactions to the Q1 figures for both IBM and Intel have pushed stock markets down. However, while the stockholders might not be getting what they want — no tears shed here — the IT areas that we know, love and like have all performed despite difficult times in Europe.

Microsoft continues to leak information on what new features will ship with next year's major Office release, the latest being more cloud support and web-type extensions.

If you're not satisfied with your existing cloud storage facility, then why not give the beta of Cubby a go. Billed as "one giant leap for your stuff", it offers a mix of local or 5GB of cloud storage and access from browsers, iPads and other devices for easy collaboration.

Today, Yammer announces the acquisition of UK-based OneDrum, a document collaboration and file sharing company that supports Microsoft Office. It's become clear that Yammer is no-longer just another social network, it's an organization's primary productivity tool.

If companies put employees first, as they claim they do, why are 71% of American workers are “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” in their work (per this Gallup poll)? If 71% of your external customers didn’t engage with your brand, would it be acceptable? Treating employees like customers is simply good business and has been directly responsible for success of “strong culture” companies like Zappos and Southwest Airlines. Southwest CEO Kelleher once said, “When you treat [employees] right, then they will treat your outside customers right. That has been a powerful competitive weapon for us.”

As the trend to move off the desktop continues, Microsoft is reducing the pricing for its web-based Office 365 suite to enterprises with various packages down between 10% to 20% with storage slashed to cents per GB.

Following hot on the heels of the JIRA 5 release, Atlassian has just announced its acquisition of HipChat, a San Francisco-based private chat service for the enterprise with serious collaboration capabilities.

You all know that Yammer is one of the most widely known enterprise social networking tools and that it has been steadily adding new capabilities that offer more than the standard micro-messaging. Today, it adds some much needed social business intelligence through a new partnership with GageIn.

Huddle offers up some new capabilities that make it easier to work when you are offline or on the go.

Bringing the live experience even closer to home, MediaPlatform today further broadens its WebCaster software to facilitate for the streaming of live or pre-recorded webcasts on Facebook Fan Pages and SharePoint collaboration sites. For corporations, brands and maybe even random YouTube sensations, the possibilities are endless.

Enterprise guinea pigs will soon be getting hold of the next big update to Microsoft's Office Suite, with the public promised beta access in the near future.

CrowdEngineering has put a patent on crowdsourcing. As you may remember, CrowdEngineering provides a platform designed to fully integrate existing processes and applications with the benefits of technical crowdsourcing. This week they put a ring on it, so to speak, by securing a patent that covers its core technology for enterprise crowdsourcing, the foundation of its flagship CrowdForce platform.

Yammer, the rapidly growing enterprise social network, exceeds 4 million corporate users and is rumored to be working on a US$ 40 million funding round.