You probably know Zoho as a SaaS company with enterprise collaboration and productivity tools. What you might not know is that they also offer on-premise deployments for companies with more than 10,000 employees. While this has been an important option for large enterprises not ready for the cloud, its limitation has always been the hardware requirements that went along with it. Starting today, that limitation disappears via partnership with VMware to get Zoho's apps running on the vSphere "private cloud" behind the firewall.

Late last week Socialtext's Michael Idinopulos wrote a post with some interesting advice for anyone looking to start a social software implementation in the enterprise: skip the pilot. His argument was that since the new breed of enterprise 2.0 tools are about human interaction, something which changes dramatically at scale, then small pilots were not a useful barometer of future success or failure.

Idinopulos admitted that pilots are great for traditional IT, which revolves around a set of actions that do not change much whether it's 10 or 10,000 people (think billing or adding leads in a CRM). We agree that in any kind of collaboration, the shift from 10 to 10,0000 causes dramatic change. But that leaves an open question: do you still use pilots for your wikis, blogs, and other social software implementations, or are they a waste of time?

Enterprise content management (ECM) is big business these days. There are scads of companies turning a tidy profit promising to do a competent job of managing every conceivable type of content, from records bound by regulation to Web content and freewheeling collaborative work. What there isn't as much of is sound advice from experienced professionals on how to save money when it comes to ECM.

At a time when IT budgets are tight and few can afford to spend anything they don't have to, Gartner's research vice president Tony Bell is offering some interesting thoughts on best practices for reducing costs. Here's our assessment of his tactics for increasing efficiency when it comes to ECM.

Reports of an update for IBM's Lotus Connections software have been circulating since early 2009. Many analysts talked of a major upgrade that would instill the suite with some substantial social functionality for the first time. After surveying the new Lotus Connections 2.5 that was released today, we can confirm those reports.

IBM has seriously improved their offering when it comes to a comprehensive platform for enterprises. While it's not exactly the bleeding edge, version 2.5 has taken software that was really behind the times and transformed it into something that shows real promise for enabling collaboration. Lotus Connections is now available for download for both customers and business partners.

Just days after Amazon launched its Virtual Private Cloud to try and attract enterprises to EC2, OpSource has announced what it's calling "the first true enterprise cloud." OpSource is essentially offering a similar "hybrid cloud" operation that allows customers to access resources in the cloud over a secure VPN connection. IT can decide just how accessible their instances are and can apply the same type of firewalls and other security policies that they would in a datacenter.

Google has now integrated its translation technology into Google Docs, allowing users to convert their documents into any one of 42 languages with the click of a button. While the official Google blog highlighted a usage case of a child translating her drawing for her family, the enterprise blog post showcases a different usage case, one for enterprises that need to translate documents for the multilingual teams that operate in a global business landscape. There's just one problem with the tool: translations are pretty rough, and it's not suited to any application for which quality is critical. That makes it fine for casual use, but not for Google Apps enterprise and education customers.

TokBox is one of the most fully-featured video chat platforms available. Like TinyChat, ooVoo, and other services, it has a close connection with social networks and other forms of sharing content. But it didn't have the kind of document-handling capabilities that could make it useful for more than just talking with friends and family or holding meetings. Now that's changed, because by integrating with EtherPad, you can now collaborate on documents in real time right within a TokBox group chat. Soon you'll also be able to add TokBox video chats to your private company EtherPads as well.

Not long ago, Google revamped its sign-on system using the federated protocols of OpenID. Now Zoho, a major provider of SaaS productivity and enterprise tools, has decided to support Google Apps accounts for anyone logging into its services.

Though the two companies definitely have overlap in areas such as online document editing, the majority of Zoho's suite is not in competition with Google. Letting Apps customers log in to its various services without creating a new account is much more attractive for Zoho than forcing unnatural competition. In the future, we're quite likely to see it integrating more closely with Google products in order to complement its software.

Amazon has launched a new endeavor that integrates traditional IT infrastructure with its EC2 cloud service. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud allows IT to connect to an isolated set of AWS resources to a data center using a VPN connection. Minus all the acronyms, that means that Amazon has created a hybrid cloud that can work securely for the enterprise, balancing the need for encryption with the low cost and scaling power that the cloud provides.

Amazon VPC provides an avenue for enterprises to more comfortably link up their infrastructure with the cloud. For Amazon, it's an endorsement of the hybrid approach, but it's also meant to combat the growing interest in private clouds. VPC is currently in limited beta (you can apply here) and doesn't work with the S3 cloud storage service or any other parts of AWS.

There are literally thousands of project management and SharePoint-based applications available, and more come out all the time. New ones are usually not that interesting. But Kiiro is a project management tool that uses a SharePoint backend yet looks like nothing like a Microsoft product.

Launched by the Alberta-based nForm, Kiiro is one of the best-looking and easiest-to-use SharePoint tools we've seen to date. You currently need to request a demo to get access, but this should be a godsend to all of those enterprises that use SharePoint by default.