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Salesforce.com is offering the capability to integrate Facebook and Twitter into its sales and customer support offerings, another sign the company is making a full-shift to the social web.

How deep is this move? On stage this morning at Dreamforce, Mark Benioff called Facebook and Twitter a "phenomena," going on to say that the integration of the social web is the biggest development for the company in the past ten years.

Salesforce.com launched a social enterprise application here at Dreamforce today that will allow companies to create their own private, social networks and integrate with Twitter, Facebook and other social applications.

Dubbed Salesforce Chatter, the application serves as a secure enterprise collaboration application and social development platform.

When you launch a make or break initiative like Windows Azure, you better get it right.

Well, from our vantage point, Microsoft got it right. How? In front of a sea of developers at the Professional Developers Conference, Microsoft trotted out a group of geek all-stars who showed how they are using Azure to do some pretty cool stuff.

Rackspace is launching a new service called "Cloud Drive," that allows businesses to store, share and back up files in the Rackspace cloud.

Rackspace is one of the world's largest hosting companies but with more services being offered in the cloud, it is starting to look like it is also establishing a presence as a collaboration services provider.

Google Sites is getting an upgrade. Starting today, Google will provide templates that it claims makes it possible for users with no technical background to create web sites with a degree of functionality that includes page layouts, adding links for navigation and embedded gadgets.

Templates are available for intranets, project sites, team sites, employee profile pages and other sites that people would use within the enterprise. Employees using Google Sites may submit their own templates to a gallery, similar to the services that Sharepoint offers.

Trying to understand the basics of cloud computing is one matter but getting a grasp on the technologies across the different platforms is another issue entirely.

To try and simplify things just a bit, Appirio is offering a map that shows the cloud ecosystem. The map breaks out 70 different layers of technology across applications, platforms and infrastructure. The map is pretty sophisticated with the ability to drill down to understand the underlying technologies.

Skype's litigation woes with eBay had businesses a bit worried. Funding Skype in the enterprise looked risky with the potential that a judge could at some point pull the code base out from under Skype and leave businesses stranded.

But that's not an issue anymore. According to Network World, Skype now has rights to the code that is essential for the service to run. That means Skype for business is a green light for the companies seeking to use the VOIP service.

Open-source search has some major advantages compared to its competitors.

First of all, it's free. Second, it stands up in comparison to the largest, proprietary search vendors. Third, there is a growing ecosystem around open-source search that makes it far easier to implement than ever before.

The chief executive of Rackspace says the company has closed the gap with Amazon, gaining significant market share in its cloud computing compared to a year ago.

In an interview with Reuters, Chief Executive Lanham Napier said a year ago Amazon was "incredibly far ahead," of Rackspace in the cloud computing market. But this year he said Rackspace has closed the gap with Amazon's web services business.

The Google executive in charge of Google Enterprise is talking smack about Microsoft Office, saying that firms will be able to get rid of the software suite in one year's time.

Man, those are some fighting words. The remarks came from Dave Girouard, president of Google's enterprise division, in an interview with ZDNet Asia.