Content Management Matters ™

There’s some interesting talk in air these days around office productivity suites and the move to using purely web-based products. Some predict the end of Microsoft if they don’t make the move to a SaaS offering. Other reports show something completely opposite.

The rumor mill is all a flutter with the expected announcement that Salesforce will begin to offer Google Apps to it's customers.

Good news for Google as this provides them with a great way to sell their services to enterprise customers. Their web apps would be sold through Salesforce.com and integrated tightly into the service.

Salesforce already enables it's customers to manage their Google Adwords campaigns from within Salesforce.com, so this is just another piece to the puzzle.

Indications of this potential integration circulated back in March when people starting finding references to Salesforce in Google CSS files. Likewise, references to Google in Salesforce documentation to things like buttons for Gmail and Google Docs lead you to believe this has been a plan in the making for a while.

Guess we'll have to wait for Monday to hear all about this and other Salesforce partner news. If you have any details please let us know. Otherwise, Stay tuned!

When Google dropped a cool US$ 625 million on communications security and compliance company Postini in July of 2007, speculation was rampant about the company's intentions, with most pointing to a desire to attract more enterprise customers by beefing up their "Apps" with security options.

The pundits appear to have gotten this one right with Google's announcement of a series of enticing email compliance and security products -- all powered by what was Postini. The new offerings include message filtering, transport layer encryption, and business records archiving and discovery. Shazam! The records management market just got Googled.

Zoho Notebook, the web-based tool for storing and sharing mixed content, has been chosen as one of the most innovative products of the year by PC World.

Released last January, Notebook is inspired by the traditional spiral notebook. It provides a web-based platform to assemble written content, drawings, multimedia, rich text and any other form of content you wish and share it with whoever you please. It can be used as a collaborative platform, an online reference source, or just a dumping site for your doodles and scraps.

Newbie to Google, Scott Johnston, the former VP of Product Development at JotSpot (which Google bought), leaked that Google will be providing Sites capabilities as part of their Google Apps suite sometime in 2008.

The Sites capability will enable a company using the Google Apps product suite to create intranets, extranets and other types of sites (like project tracking) in a collaborative environment.

Today sees the release of EditGrid Excel Plus in private beta. This new spreadsheet plug-in boasts several interesting features, but the one which will attract the most attention is a real-time spreadsheet-linking technology for which rival offerings, like those from Google and Microsoft, have no equivalent.

Workshare, which operates mainly in secure content compliance, has just released its Enterprise Document Control Solution, which provides hosted services as well as clean integration with Microsoft Office.

The system enables content collaboration between enterprises, paired with tough security and an audit trail. (Good for eDiscovery risk management.)

Microsoft has announced Office Live Workspace (OLW), which is something like a SaaS version of SharePoint Light, only perhaps lighter than one might expect.

Office currently is taking a beating in the feisty SaaS sector, where Zoho, Google Apps and others are currently vying for marketshare. Even Adobe is getting into the game, having recently announced it would be acquiring the parent company of Buzzword, which provides Office-esque capabilities seamlessly between the Web and (eww!) non-Web worlds.

Microsoft just can't get any peace. With Google Apps eroding the need to own a copy of Microsoft Office, and Zoho improving where Apps leaves off, the Word/Excel monopoly may be fast seeing sundown.

And the end may be sooner than expected, now that Adobe's announced it's going to purchase Virtual Ubiquity, the company that produces an offering called Buzzword.

As we previously covered this past April Google's been working away on a PowerPoint killer, which as of today has been launched.

Even if its not actually much of a PowerPoint killer yet, there are some spiffy aspects to it -- namely the Audience feature, Revisions and Sharing for starters. And as the feature set builds-out to cover for things like the total absence of any drawing capabilities, it will surely and incrementally sport away some of the MS Office faithful.

Read more about Google Apps.

Capgemini, based in France, will officially become the first top tech consultant to begin recommending Google's office suite to corporate clients. The partnership was announced early today.

According to Forrester Research's Ray Wong, Capgemini's support will help Google gain street cred in the enterprise sector, where people are used to spending big dollars on cumbersome software.

Capgemini is a voice of influence for over 1 million personal computers in companies around the globe, according to CNN.

Google's biggest competitor in serving SaaS-style office tools to businesses is Zoho, which plans to release Zoho Business at a cost US$ 10 lower than the search giant's office suite.

So it's finally happened: Zoho enters the enterprise at full speed with a new Suite feature called Zoho Business.

It’s been almost a year since Google acquired JotSpot, a publishing and collaboration company founded in 2004 by the Excite.com co-founders.

Since the announcement, new customer registration has not been allowed and the service has gone stagnant.

But recent whispering on the Web points toward Google re-launching the wiki service sometime in the near future.

EditGrid, a leader in online spreadsheets, today announced the launch of the iPhone Edition of its Web-based spreadsheets software. The news broke this morning at the Office. 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.

Do enterprise architects really need to be reminded that they should "do their homework" before choosing an enterprise productivity, collaboration and content management application? When considering Google Apps as an enterprise-wide option, the surrounding fog of hype certainly seems to warrant a "yes". And The Burton Group, a research and consulting firm, has just served the official version of it.