Earlier this month, Google attempted to make a shot across Microsoft's bow with an Apps Sync for Outlook. Unfortunately for them, it completely fizzled when Microsoft made clear that the plugin disabled key Outlook functionality.

Google admitted as much at the time. But today, they've announced that the issues have been fixed. Windows Desktop Search now works, and users can control how the archiving operates. For those who continued to use the completely dysfunctional version, Google will save you from yourself by automatically updating to the current release.

Plenty of enterprise 2.0 companies have set their sights on replacing SharePoint. But so far, not one has shown the gumption of Box.net, the filesharing and collaboration service which has launched the Box.net vs. SharePoint challenge.

Based on the premise that "sharing should be simple" and implying that SharePoint is anything but, Box.net's campaign is more than a marketing ploy. It's a bold sign of the growing conflict between hungry young startups and Microsoft over who will dominate business collaboration in the years to come.

Colligo Networks has long built some of the most best-known desktop applications for Microsoft SharePoint. The Colligo Contributor software suite lends offline access and an interface that's definitely easier to handle.

But with the 4.0 release of Contributor scheduled to ship on July 13th, they've expanded the suite's capabilities with a pair of tools that touch the core of SharePoint's capabilities: a new file manager and an uploader for Outlook. Other features incorporated in to 4.0 include an enhanced SDK, one-click attachments, and drag-and-drop control of folders.

While the additions to Colligo Contributor may not exactly be on the bleeding edge of enterprise software, they're something that's likely to be fairly indispensable for the legion of organizations still tied to SharePoint.

GridIron Software has finally brought Flow, its visual workflow manager, out of public beta.

This first stable version available for purchase ups the ante by allowing groups to collaborate on a workflow via the Share Maps feature, as well as adding direct access to Flow from within Adobe applications.

Flow was created with the help of visual designer Mark Coleran, who is known for his work on films such as The World Is Not Enough and the Bourne series. Though it's aimed squarely at creative professionals, Flow is probably the most advanced workflow manager out there, and is well worth a closer look by almost anyone.

At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, I asked all of the vendors, "SaaS or on-premise?" The assumption, because this conference was all about modern 2.0 stuff, was that everyone would say, "SaaS, of course."

Wrong. At least 50% of the vendors were deploying primarily on premise. Even some of the pure SaaS crowd would admit to an occasional on-premise deployment. Anecdotally, even some of those who say they are pure SaaS will deploy on premise quietly. Why are enterprise customers telling vendors that they want on-premise deployment?

On Tuesday, consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton won the Open Enterprise Innovation Award at the 2009 Enterprise 2.0 Conference.

The portal that garnered them the accolade, hello.bah.com, has shown impressive adoption within Booz Allen, especially for a firm that's 90 years old. Since being rolled out in August 2008, it's been taken up for daily use by 40% of the 21,000-strong workforce, according to Walton Smith, who's worked as an evangelist for it.

But by now, the flurry of activity around the conference has subsided, and many are left wondering just what about Booz Allen's enterprise 2.0 initiative makes them innovative? What led their social software implementation to be successful, and what patterns and practices can we imitate? After taking a look, here are five characteristics that ReadWriteWeb feels were key to the success of hello.bah.com

There's a new online booking service on the block, and it's called Book'd. While there are several other SaaS outlets for small enterprise to do this sort of thing, two simple characteristics make Book'd standout.

First, it's the only booking service ReadWriteWeb could find that also allows your enterprise to do online invoicing on top of up-front payment.

Book'd is brand new, but to our thinking, it's already got a jump on many of its competitors through plain old good design. Both the administrative interface and the public sites you can build are attractive, intuitive in navigation, and easy to manage.

As a major addition to its on-demand suite, IBM has unveiled LotusLive Connections at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, where it won the Cloud Computing Technology Buyers' Choice Award.

LotusLive has long revolved around Web conferencing, with other features being somewhat secondary. The real power for the enterprise came from IBM's Lotus Connections, which is limited to on-premise deployment. But when LotusLive Connections becomes available on June 30th, all that will change.

MindTouch, the collaborative software that began as a fork of MediaWiki, has just launched the first of three new turnkey collaborative networks for the enterprise that go far beyond the software's beginnings as a wiki.

With the next two scheduled to be made public in the next six months, this first new release is of the MindTouch Collaborative Intranet.

This intranet is focused on taking all the information from your legacy applications and integrating them in to the much more accessible interface that MindTouch has inherited from its other open source and enterprise implementations. The goal is to take the resources you need and break down the silos that separate them to create a fabric of information that is easy to comb through and work with.

Telligent, a leading community and enterprise collaboration platform, has launched the new versions of both their internal and external platforms, as well as a new analytics package to accompany them.

You may remember the various faces of Telligent as Community Server, Community Server Evolution, and Harvest Reporting Server, but they've all received new, more straightforward branding. Now it's just Telligent Community for the outward-facing software, Telligent Enterprise for the intranet solution, and Telligent Analytics for....well, you get the picture.

A preeminent community platform according to Forrester (the portion behind the firewall was not assessed), Telligent made these announcements in tandem with their presence at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, and you can check out the new software powering an unofficial community site for the gathering.