We see so many different collaboration tools that at times if feels like we are looking at the same environment over and over again.

Proton Media is entirely different. It is the most advanced collaboration environment we have seen in the market. We say this without hesitation.

The French Government's public finance department will switch 130,000 desktop PC's to Mozilla's email and calendar applications. Mozilla's Thunderbird email service, Lightning Calendar and an open-source groupware will replace IBM Lotus Notes and Microsoft Office.

The move signals how more government agencies from around the world are dropping enterprise accounts with major vendors to cut down on costs and get better license agreements.They are turning to open-source providers and companies like Google that can offer email and services such as Google Docs.

In its most significant update to date, Jive Software is following the evolution of the social web in the enterprise with features that allow users the flexibility to use the tools in multiple ways.

Social Business 4.0 (SBS), is Jive's latest version of its enterprise collaboration technology. In this new release, Jive includes deep integration with Microsoft Office, a mobile application for the iPhone and Blackberry plus the ability to bridge from internal to external communities.

Those of us who make a living by making things happen (i.e. who hustle) know that it is a people game. All of the tools in the world won't beat the chemistry and aligned motivation that come from creative win/win deal-making. The tools are like a hammer for a carpenter. You have to have them, but carpenters are not defined by their tools. However, something substantively different is happening online at the tool level, thanks to social media.

A good carpenter with a power drill will beat a good carpenter using muscle alone. A bad carpenter with a power drill is, of course, just a dangerous maniac! But we don't really have the equivalent of a power drill yet. We can see bits of it, but it is like having a drill, motor and battery that no one has put together. The pieces that make up this hustler's power drill are: email + CRM + LinkedIn + Twitter.

At the IBM Information on Demand conference, we asked Robert Ashe to sketch how he sees integration between the company's business intelligence and collaboration technologies. What he shows is how business intelligence applications and Lotus products could connect business users through mashups and social interactions.

He is a general manager at IBM and leads the company's Business Intelligence and Performance Management efforts. He was CEO at Cognos before the company was acquired by IBM in 2007.

We have looked at Calendaring many times (such as in our round-up of 10 players). In our own work, we have started working with both Tungle and Doodle. To understand more about why this market is strategically interesting, we recently spoke with Yori Nelken, CEO of Timebridge (see our previous coverage here).

Amazon is providing users with the ability to run relational databases in the cloud. The service, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), means that customers now have another way to use a cloud service for a function normally administered by an IT department.

Werner Vogels, chief technology officer for Amazon, says the new service means that RDS customers will not have to deal with "the 'muck' of relational database management freeing up its users to focus on their applications and business." RDS will take care of the headaches such as patching and IT administration of the relational database.

IBM has announced a mashup integration that fits Cognos Business Intelligence with a new version of the company's Mashup Center. The two services fit together to create an environment that leverages IBM's existing technology base with a service that's right out of a play book for social computing.

It's a small move for IBM but demonstrates that the company is thinking strategically about how to leverage its strengths in business intelligence and analytics. At the same time it shows how IBM is adopting new ways for users to communicate more effectively with multiples sources of information.

IBM is developing analytics platforms to help companies better understand how multiple pieces of information fit together to create rich forms of business intelligence.

We sat down today at the IBM Information on Demand Conference with Jeff Jonas, one of IBM's chief scientists to get a picture of the types of analysis they see emerging for users.

Business intelligence, analytics and the demand for process optimization are the big draws here at the IBM Information On Demand Conference in Las Vegas.

As one executive said on stage, its not enough to react quickly to what is happening but to predict it.