The first Alfresco AMI is only for the community edition, and doesn't include their SharePoint module or the mobile browser UI for accessing Alfresco from smartphones. Alfresco is planning future releases that will support all editions.

Alfresco follows a typical open source strategy, offering a free community edition and an enterprise edition with full support, bug fixing, and maintenance. One of the company's primary selling points has always been reduced costs, both in up front price and cost of ownership. Sticking to that strategy naturally leads to embracing the pay-as-you-go cloud, in this case EC2 from Amazon Web Services.

The one disappointment in the technical preview is that Word documents will be view only. The good news is that all formatting will be perfectly preserved in the online version, and documents can be shared and commented on by anyone. That sharing capability alone is a huge improvement in usability and workflows in an age where the desktop is no longer supreme. Users with Silverlight will have additional capabilities for zooming in and out on a document.

Excel

Excel spreadsheets will be fully editable in the preview. Note that, like the other apps, this is a more lightweight version of Excel than what you get on the desktop. Certain advanced features (such as charting) are not included, though the core needs for adding, filtering, and sorting data are all there. Users can control editing permissions for this and all other editable versions of Office Web Apps.

PowerPoint

PowerPoint will allow full editing for anyone you share a presentation with, just like Excel. That also means that this isn't a fully-featured version of PowerPoint; you'll have complete text manipulation capabilities, but some of the advanced tools for slide decks are not available.

Is it Enough?

Even if these lighter versions of Office applications are lacking some of the advanced features that users are familiar with, the ability to easily access documents on the Web and share them with those you're collaborating with is a big leap forward for the company.

Though Microsoft still clearly retains a huge amount of loyalty from users, Google has been moving aggressively to capture the attention of schools and enterprises. With this preview, the larger battle for which office suite will prevail at home, work, and in the enterprise is just beginning.

The acquisition has puzzled many, since Adobe and Omniture products really have no natural cooperation. There have been comments about the measurement capabilities that Omniture will give to content built with Adobe products. But in the end the entire deal revolves around two words: recurring revenue. Adobe's quarterly earnings have fallen due to declining sales of software licenses, and the SaaS model of Omniture will bring the company a recurring stream of revenue.

What we found is that as we've been talking to our customers, it's clear that they would like us to do a lot more. For example, the chief digital officers that we talk to at media companies have been telling us that they want to understand which content was performing the best so that they could feature it more prominently and increase their ad revenue.

Advertisers and agencies were using Flash to produce rich ads but they were telling us that they really wanted to understand what the click-through rates of those ads were in real time, to be able to take more advantage of it.

But few analysts have agreed that adding measurement power to content is really the core of this deal. Adobe announced the acquisition alongside a decrease in quarterly earnings. Even if Omniture is no longer at the forefront of innovation in analytics, its steady stream of revenue from SaaS subscriptions is a cash cow that Adobe can't afford to pass up right now.

So why is the federal government providing a free shopping cart for these vendors? By giving the software and services in Apps.gov its official blessing, the feds are making it easier for sluggish agency IT departments to save money and update aging systems by embracing the cloud.

The first incarnation of Apps.gov is divided up into four sections:

• Business Apps, which is everything from analytics to ERP. This is currently one of the areas where Salesforce.com and Google are predominate.
• Cloud IT Services, which is currently labeled as "coming soon" and is devoid of apps.
• Productivity Apps, another area Salesforce.com and Google appear almost exclusively.
• Social Media Apps, which is the most diverse area of the site thus far.

The government is playing it safe in all of the areas right now. Salesforce.com and Google Apps crop up in all categories, even in those where there are far better options. The comparatively low risk area of social media is the most diversified right now, featuring around 20 popular apps like FriendFeed, YouTube, MySpace and Flickr.

The government has spent most of its energy on bringing cloud computing leaders on board with Apps.gov. Clearly federal agencies will benefit from the official endorsement of vendors they're likely to be familiar with already. But before Apps.gov becomes a truly useful resource, the site will have to diversify its marketplace.

hat tip to chris messina

The aim of Socialwok is a provide a communication and collaboration platform on top of Google Apps, one that draws in all kinds of information that needs to be shared quickly in an organization.

"In Socialwok the concept is all around feeds," said Socialwok CEO Ming Yong in a demo video, "You can have feeds for a project, feeds for engineering, feeds for accounting, feeds for anything." Socialwok feeds don't refer to RSS feeds. They basically mean activity streams roughly equivalent to FriendFeed rooms.

Every user that logs into Socialwok with Apps (there is no other login method) gets a central feed. Other feeds can be created, such as for different teams in an enterprise, and those feeds can be made private so that you only have access to feeds you're invited to. Organizations can also selectively invite those outside their Apps domain to relevant feeds.

In addition to simple short messaging like Twitter, Socialwok feeds are also suitable for sharing content from all the other areas of Google Apps, as well as media from outside Apps, including video. "Think of us like Facebook for groups, enterprise, and businesses, but we wrap around online productivity," Ming said. In addition to intranet-style communication, Socialwok lets you publish messages to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Socialwok also supports replying to a feed through email and has good mobile access. There's currently a BlackBerry app and a dedicated mobile site for iPhone and Android users. All the mobile versions focus more on the microblogging aspects than anything else.

What about Wave?

The first thing that comes to mind when looking at how Socialwok talks about the "missing social layer" of Apps is that Google Wave is going to provide that layer. Wave is a social platform that sits on top of Apps like Socialwok does, and it does a whole lot more besides, especially since Wave is more than just a lone application.

We asked Ming what he thought of the challenge Wave presents, and he showed us an experimental feature for including a Wave inside a Socialwok feed. The company doesn't see Wave as a direct competitor.

The ability to create a private network, and topical feeds within an organization's Socialwok strikes us as a key difference as well. Whether that and other differences will be enough to build a lasting business in the face of Google Wave is unclear.

Socialwok is built on the Google App Engine. It's user interface is simple, but the core functionality makes perfect sense from the perspective of someone with an enterprise or education version of Google Apps. It's currently free, though a paid version with advanced features is part of the company's plan for the future.

Radian6 is the kind of software that we've called the future of social media monitoring for businesses. By integrating it into software known for collaboration under the control of the enterprise, Jive is wasting no time in trying to connect its customers with people outside company-run communities.

Just like the integration of SAP's BusinessObjects for analytics, Jive chose to take advantage of competence Radian6 has in social media. By including its technology Jive can use RSS feeds, Google alerts, and email between employees to track blogs, forums, photo and video sharing sites, as well as popular social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

In the past Jive has stressed creating a channel of communication between customers in a community and employees in an intranet. Now they're adding a connection to parts of the Web outside the corporate control, and we think that's a big step for enterprise software platforms.

There are plenty of companies who've recognized the importance of Twitter and Facebook for business. But Jive is offering the first complete line of communication from social networks to customer communities and collaborative software behind the firewall.

With the Outlook plug-in, an extra pane is added alongside the other aspects to Outlook. Users can then message and reply to colleagues, upload attachments, and do basically everything that the AIR app does.

The fundamental difference is that the plug-in takes microblogging to where many enterprise users are already spending a lot of their time. A prime example is how users will be able to CC an email to either their whole Yammer network or to a specific group. As for the other app, Windows Mobile may not be quite as vital as Outlook but it still has a robust presence in the enterprise mobile market.

One of the persistent dilemmmas with standalone apps like Yammer is that (even with desktop and mobile apps) it is never easy to include it in preexisting workflows. It's always harder to sell an enterprise app that doesn't play nice with systems already in place. Integrating Yammer with two Microsoft products that continue to hold mind share in the enterprise world is a step towards solving this problem.

Forrester's analysis is that despite their different view of technology, Gen Y, Millennials, or whatever you want to call those 29 and under, don't yet have the clout within organizations to make real change. The same Gen X employees who are the fastest growing demographic in Facebook are the ones getting management to accept new technology as more than a fad.

A common method for researching about how people use technology is to ask industry experts and management about what they've provided to workers and how they think it's being used. That's how many market researchers go about their business.

But Forrester has decided to just ask the employees directly in their new "Workforce Technographics" survey. Despite the imposing name, it's basically just asking people who work with computers about how they use technology, instead of going over their heads to IT and management. The survey of 2,000 individuals was conducted online in April, and was limited to those who work in companies with more than 100 employees.

It's All About Influence

A favorite argument among those who talk about the gap between Boomers, Gen X, and Gen Y is that the youngest demographic is more adept with technology. According to the survey results, that's just not true.

Gen X employees contribute to discussion forums and social networks just as much as their Gen Y counterparts. The use of blogs and wikis was either equal or different by just a couple percentage points.

But the most significant difference was not in usage stats. It was how effective employees are at getting new software to be accepted. 22% of Gen X said they felt they have the "clout in their organization" necessary to introduce new technology, while only 13% of those under 29 said the same.

Even if Gen Y was significantly better at using social software, it wouldn't matter at this point. Obviously younger employees will increase their stature within organizations as the years pass. But the idea of Millennials at the vanguard of innovation in the enterprise is a myth.

One of the hallmarks of Google Apps is its simplicity for the business user. But end use simplicity and painless administration are two very different things. This goes double for enterprise-class deployments with thousands of users.

Google doesn't rely as heavily on a partner ecosystem as Microsoft and IBM do. But LTech has still been successful with providing services and tools for augmenting Apps. Thus far they've focused on secondary functions like importing and backups, but the Power Panel they released this week targets core functions in everyday management of Apps in the enterprise.

Google is correct to pitch its cloud-based solution as easier to manage than traditional IT infrastructure. But a look at LTech's control panel module makes it fairly obvious that enterprise-wide batch operations and user management could be a lot easier.

Power to the (IT) People

Even simple additions, such as a Gmail widget with links to administration tools, show a lot of promise for speeding up common tasks. More substantial features in the panel include a framework for managing user permissions, mass group management, bulk importing and administration of shared contacts, extended field support for profiles, and global account management for jobs such as forcing password resets.

The panel definitely puts more power in the hands of IT, but it's the kind of flexibility that you want IT to have. As one example, LTech's module lets administrators remotely update any user's email settings, circumventing the need to talk users through the process or log in to their accounts.

If you've got a small scale implementation of Apps, the power panel isn't for you. The minimum purchasing requirements are 100 users at $3 per user. But for anyone wrangling an Apps instance with thousands of users, the LTech power panel might be just the thing.

Box.net worked with several developers behind the scenes prior to launch. Starting today a few key apps already use the API, ranging from document access to mind mapping and audio recording. Speaking with Box.net community manager Sean Lindo, we learned that persistent problems with the App Store approvals process kept more apps from announcing integration.

While Box.net has features that allow you to collaborate on content through their website, the company is increasingly becoming an open platform for storing and managing content you've created anywhere. By allowing file sharing to numerous other Web applications, from Twitter to Gmail, Box.net is clearly not interested in keeping a tight grip on content you store with them. Look for more news of integration from Box soon, including with other mobile devices.

Salesforce.com has launched the second version of Service Cloud, which incorporates new capabilities for handling content as well as a close connection with the social networks. Service Cloud 2 has three core components: a knowledge base for publishing longer content, Salesforce Answers for crowdsourcing support questions, and Salesforce for Twitter.

Salesforce.com is touting the first addition to Service Cloud as "knowledge as a service." Despite the overblown branding, Salesforce Knowledge is a simple platform for managing content you want to provide to customers needing assistance. It will appear as part of Service Cloud in Q4.

The content contained in the knowledge base can be distributed from within Service Cloud or added to your website. You can also send it directly to individual customers on a per-article basis, such as for info about specific products. Though they call them articles, the content can be structured in just about any way and can also include images and video.

Salesforce Answers

Salesforce Answers is an enterprise version of the Yahoo! Answers or any of the many other outlets for gathering crowdsourced responses to specific questions. Service Cloud's approach is to open customer service-related questions up.

Questions can be published either to your own customer community or to your official fan page via a Facebook app. The responses are then collected and fed back into Service Cloud, along with the Facebook likes and other metadata. Salesforce Answers will not be available until early 2011.

Salesforce for Twitter

Salesforce.com first integrated Twitter into its CRM back in March, but now the free application on the AppExchange will now be available for including in Service Cloud. It allows you to do real-time tracking of Twitter conversations, as well as search and responding to tweets from within Service Cloud.

And what about the notorious Twitter downtime? Salesforce.com representatives said they've been working directly with the Twitter product team on the integration. That might not be a conclusive answer to reliability problems, that level of communication is more than most developers accessing the API ever get, and it should seriously affect how smoothly the integration works.

Use Cases

Many enterprises are skeptical of relying on Facebook and Twitter for customer service, but Service Cloud is fairly broad software suite, not just a way to tie in with social networks. Salesforce.com said Service Cloud customers are interested in one of three general use cases:

• Companies looking to replace expensive call centers. These business might not care so much about the social media capabilities, they just want a more cost-effective solution and aren't afraid of the cloud.
• Enterprises interested in diving into social media, but which want a more comprehensive platform than single purpose apps like CoTweet. The user experience of traditional business applications might drive you batty, but many see a CRM-like approach to Twitter as a better fit with enterprise requirements, as opposed to something resembling personal apps for social networking.
• Those looking to better integrate online customer service with their website. These are the enterprises who will use the knowledge base most effectively.

Salesforce.com has been testing Service Cloud with big name customers like Dell, Comcast, and Starbucks thus far. In a briefing, the company claimed 8,000 customers were already using Service Cloud, and that it was growing much faster than any other product segment.

Rather than a native application tailored to the iPhone, BlackBerry, or Android, Socialtext chose to create a mobile browser version that is cross-platform by default. The site will detect when you're logging on through a mobile device and redirect you to a subdomain with a custom UI built to resemble Socialtext's desktop app.

Three years ago Socialtext launched miki, one of the earliest serious attempts at a mobile, enterprise-class wiki. Though miki may have been ahead of its time in many ways, it didn't see a huge amount of adoption.

Since then Socialtext has greatly expanded its platform, including an Adobe AIR desktop app to accompany the Web-based version. Socialtext President and co-founder Ross Mayfield said that the new mobile UI was modeled on that desktop app, providing a familiar experience to those customers who need alternative ways to access their content.

Why No Native App?

But why didn't Socialtext create an iPhone app? If you demo the site, it's clear that Socialtext mobile isn't meant to be a rich application with full interactive abilities, like those for social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

Instead the browser is tailored to provide simple access to communicative tools like the activity stream and microblogging, as well as the list of company profiles and contact information. With that in mind, the mobile edition is a more convenient way to keep tabs on workplace activity.

Considering the mobile approach of some Socialtext competitors, not having an app shouldn't be a letdown. Pure microblogging plays like Yammer have native apps, but as soon as you provide something more complex than short messaging, fewer vendors go that route. Jive provides no mobile support outside email integration, and MindTouch has a browser skin similar to Socialtext.

Socialtext mobile is accessible to all users immediately, including those using the free 50-user version the company launched in June. The only limitations in the beta are read-only access to SocialCalc spreadsheets and no access to the administrative dashboard. The next mobile launch is set to include some of those features.

Disclosure: Socialtext has been a ReadWriteWeb sponsor.

Tungle

The first thing you'll notice about good apps is that many of them have ridiculous names. Tungle is no exception. But ignoring the silly branding, Tungle is my pick for the most innovative of the bunch. Its Web interface is quite nice, and it has support for the broadest range of integration including: Outlook, Google Calendar, iCal, Xing, LinkedIn, Facebook, Ning, and your blog. Why so many? Tungle is all about sharing your calendar as broadly as possible after you've published it.

Doodle

Doodle doesn't have the social Web love that Tungle does, but it's dead simple. If your coworkers can't figure out how to use this, you may need to find a new career quickly. We covered Doodle launching branded versions for continuing use by a company. But if you just want to try it out once, then you don't even need an account.

TimeBridge

TimeBridge is another app that syncs well with the standard set of both cloud-based and desktop calendars. As we mentioned in our initial review, the cool thing about TimeBridge is that the "Yes/No/Best" answer that can be provided by those you invite makes it really easy to get a response even from those who might be reluctant to use this kind of app.

Setster

Setster is a little more complex to navigate, but that's because it's probably better suited to more complex scheduling jobs. If you need a persistent SaaS calendaring tool that has good collaborative characteristics, Setster is probably your best bet. Read our full review from March here.

Congregar

Congregar doesn't waste any of your time, and that's to be admired. You can create a new event to schedule right from the home page, preview what the emailed poll will look like, and then move immediately to inviting people. Done, end of story.

Presdo

Presdo is pretty slick looking, but the interface is slightly less intuitive than many of the other apps in the list. If you need something with a decent feature set that's really going to look more impressive to the boss, then Presdo would be a great choice.

Diarised

Diarised has got the simple process of online scheduling down pat. But it has one of those annoyingly long sign-up forms, and there doesn't seem to be much integration with Outlook, GCal or iCal. Diarised would be just fine for a quick and informal job, but if you're looking for something to use in the enterprise I'd pick something else.

When is Good

When is Good is probably the most bare bones of these apps on the list, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Like Doodle there's no sign-up required. It's got a highlighted calendar grid for choosing a range of dates, and it works the same whether you're setting up the poll or responding.

Meet-o-Matic

Meet-o-Matic has got a really old school UI, with check boxes for choosing the dates you want to propose to coworkers. But it's free and there's absolutely no sign-up required for the basic version. The "advanced" version is a little under $20 a year, but I would suggest you hunt around for something with a better UI and more features if you're willing to pay.

Meeting Wizard

Meeting Wizard is going to come up high in search results if you're looking for this kind of thing. It's been around for quite some time, and it has more of a corporate look than I would like. But it still definitely works fine and could be the ticket for you.

Photo by ghindo

The usual suspects, such as Dave Winer and our own RSS geek, quickly jumped to the defense of really simple syndication. But where was the data to back them up? And what do businesses think about RSS? The McKinsey Global Survey on Web 2.0 in business came out yesterday, and out of the almost 1,700 executives they talked to, 42% said they see a measurable benefit from RSS. That's 24% more than those who see any benefit from microblogging (i.e. Twitter).

Gillmor isn't the only one to confuse RSS with the apps that deliver it. The definition McKinsey provided to execs was "RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an application that allows people to subscribe to online distributions of news, blogs, podcasts, or other online information."

As Winer puts it so well, RSS is how the news flows. But both the public Web and enterprises are using RSS, which is embedded in numerous applications, to do more than just news gathering on items that would be Twitter-worthy.

McKinsey Quarterly's survey was conducted online in June of this year, and garnered 1,695 responses from executives working in a wide range of regions and verticals. The aim of the survey was to ask "about the value they have realized from their Web 2.0 deployments in three main areas: within their organizations; externally, in their relations with customers; and in their dealings with suppliers, partners, and outside experts."

The specific technologies McKinsey asked about included everything from wikis to mashups and prediction markets. 69% of respondents said they're seeing measurable gains from these types of technologies both internally and externally.

RSS racked up quite a bit of support from the executives, coming in third after blogs and video sharing sites. While Steve Gillmor and others may have kicked RSS to the curb in favor of Twitter and other tools, people outside the sphere of early adopters are getting a lot of rewards from RSS still.

The previous history system of EtherPad was fairly clunky. Users had to stop and save revisions in order to view them later, which disrupted the fast pace of collaborative editing that makes EtherPad such a joy to use. The new Time Slider solves the problems of the old system by letting you play back all the edits to a page. It works something like an online video player, letting you star particular spots of interest and go back and forth in time at will.

EtherPad works on a freemium pricing model, letting anyone create a public EtherPad to share for free. For teams needing a more secure SaaS version, it'll cost you $8/user/month and a self-hosted version for the enterprise is $99/user.

In order to draw in repeat customers, EtherPad knows it has to have something a little more feature rich than a simple editing app. They need integration with other apps, such as the alliance with group video conferencing tool TokBox they recently announced.

Real-time Revision History

EtherPad also needed a more robust audit trail of editing in order to make enterprises comfortable. They could have gone the more wiki-like route, by saving all revisions automatically. But those systems tend to have a certain amount of overhead when it comes to learning them, and they aren't generally a good fit for real-time editors. Google Docs is a primary competitor of EtherPad, and the weakness of its revision system is definitely an example of this problem.

In trying it out I found the Time Slider to be very easy to use, and it gave a clearer picture of the entire stream of changes to an EtherPad document. The best way to understand it is simply to see it for yourself, so be sure to watch the video below.