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Team Apart is an online meeting space and collaboration tool launched in private beta today. The software includes a browser-based video/audio conference, a text notepad, and a whiteboard for drawing. All of these options are updated in real-time for conference attendees, and the conference space can persist over time.

Obvious competitors for Team Apart are the larger Web conferencing solutions like WebEx and GoToMeeting. But considering the document side of Team Apart and the fact that its work spaces stick around, the startup most similar is AppJet's EtherPad.

The news of Microsoft Office 2010 confirmed what many suspected: Microsoft will be offering a free online version of Office to compete with all of the SaaS suites out there. Thanks to some WHOIS sleuthing by istartedsomething, we now also know where it will reside. Office.com is likely to be the home of the SaaS Microsoft Office.

Network Hippo is a new startup taking direct aim at the open source and SaaS CRMs so popular with small business. On top of contact management, it adds the ability to handle documents, manage tasks and business deals, and rate the strength, importance and opportunities for each relationship listed in your network.

Network Hippo is a project of Mercury Grove, which has also made other business software, including a CRM. Network Hippo's niche is fine-grained control of business relationships, rather than just a one-size-fits-all pipeline of leads. But unlike social CRM offerings, Network Hippo is something of an odd duck. It's not just a CRM, but it's also not really connected to the social Web.

After 18 months in development, MobileIron's virtual smartphone platform is ready for the spotlight. It's one of the few startups that focuses solely on mobile technology for the enterprise, and with almost $9 million in venture funding, it is a serious play at giving IT a better handle on smartphones.

MobileIron is not an app development shop or something specific to single devices. It's a cross-platform tool for companies to get hard data on the use of smartphones by employees, creating a pipeline between enterprise IT behind the firewall and employees out on the job. By providing real insight into how mobile plays a part in business, MobileIron could transform how the enterprise views mobile.

Half of the team that founded Etsy, along with a former Etsy and Amazon.com product manager, have quietly launched a new startup. Postling is a centralized platform for small businesses to publish to the social Web.

The pitch is that it's a single place to do all your social media work. If you're thinking it sounds like a clone of other multi-network social media apps, you'd be only partly correct. By signing up on the site, businesses get a single place to blog, share photos and post to social networks. With no free option, it's clearly positioning itself as a business tool and not a place for social media addicts, like FriendFeed or Ping.fm.

Enterprise software giant SAP can now be your OpenID provider, according to a blog post from the company this morning. Through their pilot program, you can use an openid.sap.com subdomain as your single sign-on identifier.

The decision to become a provider stemmed directly from the SAP Community Network, which, in addition to being a central site, is connected to a whole host of partners that require separate logins. The aim is to let customers who use the SCN's resources avoid any headache as they move through the network.

Everyone is falling all over themselves to talk about tablets. Yesterday Wired.com topped them all in the hype department by declaring 2010 to be the year of the tablet. But let's just slow down a minute. Yes, a big old pane of multi-touch goodness is a thing of beauty, and we're just as susceptible to its magic as you are. But there's a reason tablets haven't caught on to date.

Webtrends has launched the ninth version of its Web analytics platform for the enterprise, and it's impressive indeed. In addition to a standards-based interface that's data-driven and accessible, three new features make Webtrends 9 stand out from the crowd.

First, there's a selective RSS overlay to let you match site activity with key feeds. Second, you can now generate URIs and REST urls to export your data and embed it in applications and Excel spreadsheets. Last, but definitely not least, is the story view, which automatically turns your entire analytics report into a short narrative for use in emails, reports, and presentations.

Assembla, which makes collaborative workspaces for software development teams, has added a version you can download in order to run private installations. Every day, more pure play SaaS vendors in the collaboration space appear, but Assembla is a startup that also offers a robust self-hosted version as well.

Assembla is a wide-ranging software package for distributed teams: there are browsers for Git and Subversion code repositories, project management, activity streams, as well as ticketing, bug tracking, and issue management. In addition to the download that's now available, you can get a free public space or a private instance on EC2.

In a new report studying social networking on intranets, Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen asserts that despite broad awareness, real execution of Web 2.0 in the enterprise is still rare at this point.

We've noted Nielsen's skepticism when it comes to Web 2.0 in the past, but it's not outlandish to acknowledge that the enterprise moves slowly to adopt new technology. By doing so, the entire industry receives a sobering reminder of just what it takes to make change happen in business.