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Google announced today that everyone using Google Apps enterprise or education editions can now use their organization's domain as a federated single sign-on. That means that millions of schools, businesses and other organizations can now use their Apps accounts as an OpenID.

For a movement that has seen adoption held back because of confusion or just plain unfamiliarity among consumers, this should be a huge boost. However, a few prominent developers and advocates feel that Google's approach is not entirely acceptable. They are critical of the use of vendor-specific extensions and APIs instead of the open standards that are so important to OpenID.

Today, IBM announced two acquisitions: source code and application security company Ounce Labs, and SPSS, a provider of predictive analytics. Both purchases arrive on the heels of IBM picking up the privately-held Exeros in May.

Downturn or not, IBM isn't picking these companies up on the cheap. SPSS — a publicly traded firm — was bought for $1.2 billion, which breaks down to an all-time high of $50 a share. With others by Intel and Oracle as well, the recent flush of acquisitions shows things are picking up for the software sector.

Intuit launched code.intuit.com today, an open source community that functions as an extension of their partner platform. The new site is designed to give partner companies a free resource with code, toolkits, and documentation for building SaaS apps.

Code.intuit.com has been released as a complement to the federated applications program, which lets developers use any programming language and cloud infrastructure they like. Though it was public, the platform has been taken out of beta and is released under the Common Public License.

Are you backing up your Google Docs? If not, it's better to be safe than sorry, especially when it comes to the cloud. For customers of the enterprise and education versions of the document software as a service, LTech's new tool lets administrators do comprehensive or selective backups.

There have been options before to backup your Docs, but LTech seems to be the first official enterprise partner of Google to offer such a software package. Currently there's a single user demo available for free, with an enterprise license for the domain version (of Apps).

It was inevitable really. Ever since Google Wave burst on to the scene as the next hot thing, someone, somewhere was going to beat Google to the punch and release something comparable. That something is Shareflow, a new SaaS play by New York City-based startup Zenbe.

Up until now, Zenbe has been focused on simple productivity tools like a webmail client and collaborative to-do lists, and this is really their most ambitious project to date. Though the folks behind Zenbe deny any claims that they created Shareflow to explicitly imitate Google Wave, not even they can deny the obvious similarities.

Twitter has launched Twitter 101, a "special guide" to the 140-character network aimed at businesses. Use of Twitter by marketing departments has seen explosive growth recently, if you're a user of the site that's obvious by now.

But for businesses, the ins and outs of using the site are not obvious. From small local businesses to huge international brands, countless companies have totally flubbed when it comes to using Twitter.

This month, two painful but impossible to ignore facts have emerged about mobile use by business. First, research from Forrester suggests IT support for business use of personal mobile devices has a big impact on enterprise collaboration, with fewer of the challenges that new technology like cloud computing present.

Second, a new report from Gartner asserts that despite mobile IT support just beginning to really blossom, a full 80% of businesses will spend more than they need to on voice and data costs in the next five years. That dichotomy, the one between big expectations and overeager spending, is a paradigm that could cripple the sustainable growth of mobile in the enterprise.

We all know no one reads privacy policies. What do the top websites really include in them? In its mission to get anonymous public data, The Common Data Project a New York City-based non-profit, is on a mission to eliminate the barriers that privacy policies pose.

In a new report, they analyzed ten of the most popular Web properties on the Internet, and several more emerging ones. Here's how what they put in their policies affects your privacy, and how other enterprises can imitate their best practices.

Today, Oracle has acquired GoldenGate Software. GoldenGate is a vendor of real-time data integration software, designed to do fast, log-based transactions of data in the enterprise.

For a company best known for its enterprise databases, buying technology that facilitates speedy access to data is a brilliant move. With a decoupled architecture that can deal with large volumes of information, GoldenGate is a proven platform that should lend much-needed data management acumen to Oracle's capabilities.

As of July 22nd, all MySQL.com Web services have become completely inaccessible. Just in time for OSCON, the failure leaves all six million or more users of the open source database system unable to access source code, bug tracking, or discussion forums on the site.

According to Duleepa "Dups" Wijayawardhana of Sun Microsystem's MySQL Community Team, the problem was the result of a massive power outage in Uppsala, Sweden, where the infrastructure is located.