ReadWriteEnterprise

"It was a nightmare." That's how CEO Mike Levinson described trying to organize his work with DreamIt Ventures before he set out to create the collaboration tool WizeHive. To date, WizeHive has stood out from the crowd in two ways: it's workspaces are more customizable than many collaborative suites, and it connects better to the public Web with Twitter integration and other abilities.

WizeHive's latest release has a new focus on document collaboration within your workspace. By fleshing out its capabilities and finalizing a pricing plan, the bootstrapped startup is preparing to come out of beta in September — hopefully with a round of funding.

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.

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.

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.

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.