ReadWriteWeb

Customer service reps, it's your lucky day. It just so happens that three of the top Web-based support applications — ticketing system Zendesk, issue tracker JIRA, and customer service platform Get Satisfaction — are now integrated.

Though much of this functionality was created independently by each of these three vendors, the result is a smooth connection between a public support tool, an individualized helpdesk, and an enterprise issue tracker. Together, the trio makes up a powerful set of tools for responding to customers in either a public or private forum.

MindTouch — the open source, wiki-based intranet — is the first software to bring fully collaborative video to the enterprise. The new feature comes from open source video platform Kaltura, which is also developing video editing for Wikipedia. Through Kaltura, MindTouch customers will be able to cooperatively edit, publish and syndicate video both inside and outside the firewall, all with a complete revision history.

In addition to collaborative video editing, users can now package their applications and content for reuse on other installations. Developers will be able create open source add-ons that operate just like those in Firefox, and anyone can use a desktop GUI to select content for staging and migration.

Today, the Salesforce AppExchange has acquired one of the most-requested additions to the Salesforce.com CRM: integration with FreshBooks, the popular Web-based invoicing software.

Built by cloud development agency FirmCloud in collaboration with FreshBooks, the FreshBooks Connector for Salesforce allows an enterprise to smoothly create an invoice for a contact or opportunity within their CRM.

For many branches of the U.S. military, it's the year to bring Web 2.0 inside the war room. Flagship experiments in many a division are using open source wiki software like MediaWiki and MindTouch.

In both free and paid deployments, these collaborative networks are proving to be a favorite testing ground for a new way to manage the knowledge of soldiers. In some ways, these rigidly hierarchical organizations are displaying an real willingness to experiment, compared to the civilian businesses declaring themselves enterprise 2.0.

With improvements to email integration and a new marketing campaign, SaaS productivity vendor Zoho is aiming its sights openly at Salesforce.com, the dominant Web-based CRM today.

The "Zwitch to Zoho" name might be cheesy marketing, but the cheaper subscription price is no joke. If you want more than 5 users, Salesforce.com will cost you $65/user/month. As of today, Zoho is offering an unlimited use CRM subscription for just $12.

Are you ready to move your documents in to the cloud? Knowledge Tree has released the new SaaS version of its document management software, dubbed KnowledgeTreeLive. Knowledge Tree is an open source commercial vendor, with both a community edition under the GPL and a proprietary enterprise version.

The new subscription-based KnowledgeTreeLive is hosted on Amazon EC2. It has all the features of the on-premise version of the software, but also includes integration with the Zoho Office Suite for a fully cloud-based approach.

In its midyear global security report for 2009, Cisco says there's plenty to be worried about when it comes to the way that online crime operations are operating.

Bot herders and other nefarious characters are still using cutting-edge computing and social engineering. But according to Cisco's analysis, the real innovation is how those behind some of the biggest threats are collaborating in new ways. It's enterprise 2.0 for the criminal underbelly of the Internet.

Lithium has changed its game. Once limited to customer communities, the company has moved to become a complete social CRM for the enterprise.

Lithium's new approach creates a flow of information from the social web into your community. The result is the creation of valuable content, community-driven support, and the identification of engaged customers. The only stumbling block may be the ambiguity behind the company's new messaging.

At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, one question I asked all vendors was about their sales model. Were they relying on grassroots adoption, one click at a time, letting the software do the talking, not employing any sales people? Or did they follow the tried and true model of mixing inside sales (telephone, qualifying, small deals) and big-game hunters who close major deals with the large firms?

A lot of vendors said it was a mix of both, the first model for SMB and the second for enterprise. That makes sense. But some were pure play (i.e. no salespeople employed). Before dismissing this as crazy, think of some of the highly successful companies in this category; Basecamp, Atlassian, and Zoho come to mind. But grassroots adoption flies in the face of the enterprise's need for structure and control. So, some enterprise are pouring weedkiller on it (tip of the hat to Oliver Marks for the weedkiller analogy). Presumably, they see these young shoots as weeds and not beautiful flowers or nourishing plants. Why?

Software giant Oracle has increased prices by a full 40% for some products. Specifically, the diagnostics and tuning packs for enterprise database management have swelled to $5,000 since December. The Spatial database also went up from $11,500 to $17,500.

No company spokesman has yet commented to ReadWriteWeb or other sources, and the full reasoning behind the price hike remains unexplained, officially anyway. Unofficially, it's clear that Oracle is looking to its most high-end products to raise the bottom line during lean times.