The top story from the Googleplex this week is the announcement confirming Google Wave will be available to 100,000 testers this fall. The latest project lead by Google Maps developers Lars and Jens Rasmussen, Google Wave is an open source collaboration and communications platform that fuses conversations and documents in real-time.

Developers have already been getting their hands dirty in the Google Wave Sandbox with almost 6,000 active accounts. Google is working on filling an additional 20,000 account requests over the next month.

Leading up to the September 30th test launch Google will be working on increasing the stability, speed and usability of the Google Wave platform while expanding API features.

Source: Google Wave Developers Blog

At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference today in Boston, collaborative social software provider Socialtext announces Socialtext Free 50 to entice companies on the fence to integrate enterprise social networking into their organizations. This new freemium model offers online collaboration tools such as micro-blogging, social networking, personalized home pages, and a wiki workspace.
 
“Many of our customers take a practical approach of workgroup use, before widespread transformative deployments,” said Eugene Lee, CEO of Socialtext. “These new offerings enable more businesses to discover a new way of working without barriers and decide when to engage with us to grow revenue, strengthen customer relationships and adapt to change. Socialtext continues to exercise its Enterprise 2.0 leadership with a ‘freemium’ SaaS business model, while expanding the power of its social software platform.”
 
Features reserved for premium accounts that you won’t see in Socialtext Free 50 include multiple wiki workspaces, technical support, the ability to deploy Socialtext behind company firewalls, access to the SocialCalc collaborative spreadsheet, and obviously the ability to allow more than 50 users to access your company’s Socialtext account.

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference began today in Boston. Over 20 companies were chosen to announce their latest developments for business collaboration and enterprise social networking. Following up with Part 1 of this article, here is what will be introduced at the conference over the next few days…
 
nGenera Corporation unveils nGen Collaboration to enable companies to increase efficiency and productivity through an innovative collaboration platform. nGenera is also the creator of Collaborative Enterprise Management (CEM).
 
Open Text Social Media supports compliance and security while giving companies the social productivity tools that employees desire, enhanced by mobile access through devices such as the iPhone and Blackberry.
 
PIEmatrix launches project management “made for humans” through integrated “pie” and “matrix” models designed around the way people think. Create teams, manage, and execute projects in real-time.
 
RollStream enterprise community management and collaboration software announces a new Onboarding solution for accelerating growth within supplier and customer oriented communities.
 
SimpleFeed content syndication publishing and analytics platform will announce Twitter integration to allow users to seamlessly publish content to their Twitter accounts.
 
Socialtext announces a distributed social spreadsheet known as Socialcalc, updates to the Signals micro-blogging application including a full page Web UI, and will introduce a new mainstream offering this week at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference.
 
Sun Microsystems unveils SLX Enterprise, a video community platform for business. SLX enhances communication and collaboration between employees, customers, and partners through social media.
 
ThoughtFarmer releases the latest version of it’s turnkey social intranet software. New features in ThoughtFarmer 3.5 include Discussion Capture for monitoring email threads, an improved People Directory, tree-view navigation, and enhanced performance.
 
Tomoye Community Software 3.0 is a social community platform which can be deployed on top of Microsoft SharePoint or as a standalone system.
 
Twinsoft introduces Convertigo Enterprise Mashup Server 4.5 to capture Web and legacy data and processes to create Web 2.0 enterprise mashups.
 
Yakabox 3.1 knowledge sharing software from Yakabod combines collaboration, social networking, content management and search with security features that make it the choice of the U.S. intelligence community.

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference will begin on Monday in Boston and more than 20 companies have been selected to showcase their new enterprise collaboration and business social media offerings. Here is what we can expect to see this week…
 
Alcatel-Lucent is integrating real-time communications and Web 2.0 technologies with OmniTouch My Instant Communicator.
 
ArtusLabs mixes collaboration and social networking with refined scientific data mining to drive research with Ensemble for Life Science 4.5.
 
blueKiwi combines social recommendations, micro-blogging, idea generation and widgets into a new business platform with bK2009 Social Board.
 
Bluenog will showcase an open source Enterprise 2.0 development platform, or Integrated Collaborative Environment: ICE 4.5.
 
Box.net has created a partnership with a global provider to offer users anytime-anywhere document shipping.
 
Brainpark productivity and collaboration software will announce a new Task Awareness system that learns from employee work history to provide recommendations on contacts and resources.
 
Central Desktop has developed a SaaS mico-blogging platform for business.
 
CMS Watch has updated it’s Enterprise Social Software & Collaboration research and will release the new results.
 
Joyent will announce two new products at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. Develop, deploy and scale web applications with the Joyent Smart Platform. My.Joyent allows companies to monitor and control their Cloud Infrastructure within the Joyent Cloud via a new web interface.
 
Leverage Software will debut major updates to it’s business social networking platform including new conversation tools and enhanced privacy.
 
NewsGator’s Social Sites 3.0 beta, which is built on top of Microsoft SharePoint, will offer new features including self-assembling wikis called Socialpedias and the ability to rate Topic Experts.

Adobe understands that collaboration is much more about people than it is about technology and has designed Acrobat.com to be easy to use yet powerful. Acrobat.com offers a suite of web-based collaboration applications focused on helping business people solve business problems. “Acrobat.com is poised to become the online destination for team collaboration,” says Rob Tarkoff, senior vice president, Adobe Business Productivity Unit. This week Adobe ends the public beta and the future of Acrobat.com begins.

Moving out of public beta means Acrobat.com is now offering premium subscription services for businesses, with a limited free service still available. Premium Basic and Plus subscriptions both offer online word processing, unlimited file downloads, and premium 1-on-1 tech support, but the Basic plan ($149/year) only allows 10 PDF files to be created per month and a 5 person web conference capacity while the Plus plan ($390/year) offers unlimited PDFs and a 20 person capacity.

Over the next year Adobe has plans to release new features at Acrobat.com including more real-time collaboration tools for documents, a new interface, shared team workspaces, mobile access, social media style updates, integration with desktop tools, and increased support for the development community.

Here are some of the latest enterprise collaboration product releases…

Google now offers a solution for integrating Microsoft Outlook seamlessly with Google Apps Premier or Education Editions. Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook allows users to connect to Google Apps and sync business emails, contacts, and calendars via the Outlook client. This product is positioned towards Outlook lovers who are reluctant to break away from the familiar interface but want to take advantage of the Google cloud. The standard Gmail web interface is also available when away from the desktop. Google Enterprise president David Girouard asserts that businesses will save an average of $17 per employee per month by switching to Google Apps.

NEC announced this Tuesday a new video web conferencing and collaboration application dubbed UC for Enterprise (UCE) Collaboration. Goals of the new product include frequent and meaningful contact for enhanced customer service, tech support, remote product demos, and as an upgrade from audio-only conferencing. Also introduced was Hosted Collaboration, which offers the same features and functionality packaged as a web-based service for small and medium sized businesses. UCE Collaboration and Hosted Collaboration are focused on reducing the costs of communicating with employees and customers within the enterprise.

Building up steam is collaboration startup WizeHive, which recently announced several new enhancements to it’s free web-based application. WizeHive at the core offers a collaborative environment for group-messaging and task management within user-defined workspaces, alongside activity tracking and file sharing features. Upgrades to the platform include Twitter integration, “3D Tasks” which offers new filters and drag-drop functionality, and an Adobe Air powered desktop client. Video presentations for each of these new features are available on the WizeHive Vimeo homepage.

The latest from Google Labs is a simplified data analysis and visualization tool that allows users to collaboratively develop and manage tabular data. Traditional database systems are known for containing complex SQL queries and transaction processes. Google Fusion Tables has developed a system where the “focus is on fusing data management and collaboration: merging multiple data sources, discussion of the data, querying, visualization, and Web publishing.”
 
Collaborating on large data sets has the potential to produce inaccurate results simply through process. Duplicate copies of the data can emerge where inconsistencies occur. Google Fusion Tables provides a workspace in the cloud where you can invite multiple users to collaborate. Changes made to the data are consistent and you can also select which portions of your data to share with collaborators. An attribution feature gives credit where credit is due, so you’ll know who made what changes. Discussion features allow you to carry on conversations along rows, columns, or even specific cells.
 
The most power feature is the ability to combine multiple data sets and really see the big picture; data from independent sources can be fused on a primary key. Visualization features allow you to instantly present your data on charts and maps; Google Fusion Tables will automatically interpret locations from your data. You can also apply filters to enhance and tweak your visualizations.
 
Google Fusion Tables is fresh out of the garage, so for testing purposes you are allowed to import Microsoft Excel (.xls) and Google spreadsheets, or CSV (comma-separated values) files with up to 100 MB per data set, and a max of 250 MB per user account. You can also export data to CSV files.
 
Source: Google Research Blog

Traditionally companies handled consumer complaints directly or through authorized vendors. If you had a problem with a product or service you’d either go to the place of purchase or contact the company directly. If the problem was handled swiftly and to the satisfaction of the consumer then most likely their were no negative repercussions for the company and possibly even praise for excellent customer service. However if you had an unsatisfactory result then you were likely to spread negative feedback among your friends and family and the news would travel through the grapevine. While this is not the type of word-of-mouth publicity companies are looking for, usually the distance that the unfavorable information travels is reasonably finite, and the damage isolated.
 
The advent of social media produced a viral method of distributing information including thoughts, ideas, rumors and opinions. Negative feedback about your company can spread like virtual wild-fire through a number of social media channels. Claims made against companies, whether true or false, once published on the Web have the potential to never disappear. In many cases you can request false information be removed either directly by the author, the publishing platform, or the hosting company. Software and hosting companies do not want your legal troubles so they usually expedite such matters. If your request falls of deaf ears typically a cease and desist from your legal council is enough to do the trick. Sometimes, however, these claims ring of truth or are merely opinions protected under the First Amendment. In these cases it is pertinent that companies appropriately respond to such statements in order to salvage their reputation and their business.
 
Social media monitoring, metrics, analysis and reputation management companies offer solutions to track what is being said about your company across popular social networking platforms, blogs, forums, news outlets, and more. You can track keywords, phrases, demographics, geo-locations, and know exactly where to send your corporate bag men to silence the source (just kidding… or are we?).
 
Not only can you drill down the sources of information about your company, you can also identify which individuals are influencing conversations about your products or industry and engage with them directly. Some solutions, such as Sysomos Media Analysis Platform (MAP) offer collaboration features that allow you to share information with co-workers and across teams. Similar products include ReputationDefender, Sentiment Metrics and SM2 from Techrigy.

For those of us that frequently create PowerPoint style presentations with a colleague or in a team, we know the mundane task of creating slides, emailing them to our colleague to review, then they email them back with changes, rinse, repeat, blah… Not only is this workflow model sub-par, problems that often arise include formatting issues, email file-size limitations, and the general lack of unified communication and collaboration within the whole process. Luckily now there is a better way thanks to Adobe Presentations.
 
Adobe recently released Presentations as an addition to their Acrobat.com suite of web-based collaboration tools. The optimized workflow model allows you to collaborate in real-time on presentations with one or multiple team members. The ability to simultaneously work on slides and build presentations eliminates the need for a group to all be huddled around the same computer, but delivers the feeling of a team effort.
 
Not only can you collaborate to create the presentation, you can also deliver your presentation from the same platform. Invite co-workers or clients from remote locations and save time and money on travel. Additionally you can modify your presentation as you receive feedback from your audience.
 
Other collaboration tools available in the Acrobat.com suite include file sharing and storage, document collaboration with Adobe Buzzword, PDF conversion, and screen sharing with Adobe ConnectNow.

The latest offering for companies looking to leverage the power of collaborative social networking software is CubeTree. This collaboration suite offers a similar feel to popular consumer social networks such as Facebook and Twitter but delivers them privately and securely for companies looking to collaborate internally. The real question though is can it compete with other offerings already available such as Yammer, Socialtext and Jive while convincing enterprises to rely less on their inboxes and more on enterprise social networking?
 
CubeTree touts features such as micro-blogging, wikis, goal tracking, file sharing, link sharing and more. CubeTree also offers free and paid version of its social collaboration tools. The free Basic version allows for unlimited users within a company’s network but very limited storage per user (only 10 MB). Professional and Enterprise versions offer 1 GB each per user along with upgraded administration features.