ReadWriteEnterprise

If you are in the market for an enterprise social networking tool and haven't yet considered Yammer or Jive or Socialtext or the dozens of other competitors out there, there is a new version 3.0 of Neudesic Pulse that might be worthy for you. It will be announced next week at the Microsoft Convergence conference, and the reason is clear: they offer the best integration with a variety of Microsoft services to their social streams. (We noted that Yammer had SharePoint integration for more than two years here.)

I started using my first content management system around 1997, when things were crude and clumsy. You would think in the past 15 or so years time would heal all and improvements would be made, but you would be wrong. The modern CMS is still in a state of flux.

In the early days of the CMS we had major players such as OpenText (which didn't really have true CMS functionality until around 2002), Vignette (which was a separate company before being acquired by OpenText in 2009), and Fatwire (which was acquired by Oracle this past summer), among others. Note a trend here? These were gigantic software installations, requiring six figure PO's and a phalanx of consultants to care for and feed these beasts. They were and still are the exclusive domain of the IT department, who treated them like other big-ticket software installations. If you wanted to build a corporate website, you need plenty of time to plan your requirements and implement the code.

Of all the software technologies that are least suited to getting a makeover that's "about the experience," you'd think databases would rank pretty far down. The database experience, if there is one, is typically about accuracy, reliability, and speed. Certainly Oracle's frequent measurements ("5x," "10x," "20x" and so on) are all about those metrics.

But Microsoft has found an angle with respect to SQL Server 2012, the second round of announcements for which came this morning in Seattle. The new angle starts with multitouch, but then it runs deeper, touching on the larger problem of data getting fragmented and redundantly duplicated as it gets used and visualized.

Atlassian announced today a new version 4 of its Confluence team collaboration software tool.

We covered version 2.9 here several years ago and since then they have been busy adding all sorts of features, including improving the wiki markup and editing tools, using Twitter-like @mentions to notify users with new content, a collection of macros and other automated content tools, and the ability to paste screenshots, videos and graphics directly into the editing tool.

Microsoft Office 365, the cloud-based service from Microsoft (read our take on it here), already supports Outlook/Exchange, SharePoint, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Lync. We've reported that BlackBerry Enterprise Server is coming to 365 as well. What else can you expect to see in Microsoft's cloud in the future?

According to Mary Jo Foley, Dynamics CRM Online and Windows Intune have already confirmed. And Microsoft Business Solutions Corporate Vice President Michael Park let slip that Project and Visio are on the way as well.

Having grown up during the transition from mainframes to PCs and worked in IT when we were first installing PCs, I find it amusing to see how people return now and then to the topic of collaboration in the Internet and SaaS era. Last month media pundit Jeff Jarvis weighed in with his comments here. Notably, he says:

The iPad isn't just a hot new consumer device, it's also an increasingly popular tool for business. Each week we take a look at the new or updated business apps for the iPad, and highlight trends in how tablets are being used in the enterprise.

This week week we look at the newly released Adobe Photoshop Touch apps, a couple tools for managing your tasks and more.

Project Barcelona, a new project in the works from Microsoft, will give enterprises Web crawler-like tools for searching and storing information. The crawlers will search Microsoft products such as SQL Server, Excel and SharePoint and extra metadata. Barcelona Index Server will then serve-up the metadata, making it easier to find and access business information across the enterprise. There will also be Barcelona tools designed specifically for database administrators.

According to the project's FAQ: "Project Barcelona however is not a centrally controlled metadata repository in the traditional sense in that the overall design embraces the decentralized and web-like nature of the modern enterprise."

The iPad isn't just a hot new consumer device, it's also an increasingly popular tool for business. Every week we take a look at the latest developments in its use in the enterprise.

This week we look at a new iPad app for cardiologists, new apps from SugarCRM, Radian6 and Zoho and a few more apps that bring SharePoint to the iPad.

Employees may be bringing iPhones and iPads into work, but that doesn't take Microsoft out of the game. SharePoint is still a wildly popular enterprise platform. An InfoTech survey on enterprise collaboration last year found that 73% of its respondents were using SharePoint. Maybe new collaboration and knowledge sharing platforms will eventually displace it, but for now it's an enterprise standard. Here are a few ways you can access it from the iPad and other devices.