Enterprise Collaboration News, Reviews

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.

Providing a successful customer experience is hard enough for many organizations, so it’s no wonder creating an equally rewarding and productive experience for employees can seem almost impossible. 

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.

I recently had the opportunity to interview Mark Kashman, a Senior Product Manager for SharePoint at Microsoft. I wanted to get his views on Office365, SharePoint Online and how he sees this cloud offering co-existing with SharePoint "On Premise" in the future.

Enterprise social networking provider Yammer may only be four years old, but it has a huge allowance and lots of friends. Yammer, which has been adopted by over 4 million corporate users, announced a significant influx of new cash from its fifth round of funding.

We're wrapping up our month of Social Business today, so in the spirit of endings I thought I'd help you embrace a new way of thinking via a statement from Olivier Blanchard: Social is something you are, not something you do. 

At Wednesday’s #socbizchat TweetJam, we discussed the core elements, challenges and opportunities of social business. Lest you think this was just more of the same about how the enterprise needs to embrace collaboration and social engagement to become more successful, you obviously weren’t paying attention.

With Yammer SAP Connector installed, SAP customers can see updates from business suite applications as activity stories in Yammer's Ticker.

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.

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.

Since it was founded in 2008 in Ontario, Igloo has grown steadily in North America and the EMEA. Its growth has been aided by the confluence of cloud computing, social media, and mobile technologies. And this year, it's set to grow again and has raised C$ 5 million to push growth.

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.

2011 was the year of the Social Business. We saw employees across all types of organizations using both desktop-bound and mobile social tools to interact with the entire business ecosystem. But, while there's no question about organizations increasingly using these tools to collaborate and communicate, were enterprises truly able to capture their full potential? Let's take a look back at a few highlights from the past year.