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.)

Both Podio and Mzinga have announced major updates to their enterprise collaboration and social streaming services this week. While they operate at different price points, this is yet another indication of product maturity in this space.

First is Podio, whom we included as one of our 2011 startups to watch from last December. New this week is what they call Employee Network where everyone from the same company will automatically be joined, and only those with a verified domain email address can get access. This gets around the startup effort to promulgate Podio across the company. They also made changes to their pricing model too.

You probably don't know that IBM sells a social media and community building tool that competes with Socialtext and Jive and combines wikis, social streams, discussion forums and integrates with IBM's Sametime for presence/IM communications. It is called Connections and today IBM announced that mobile versions of Connections are free to download. This is a good thing, because their pricing was driving me batty. The software that has more options than your father's Oldsmobile, and trying to find the right place to learn about it on IBM's Web site isn't easy either. (Try starting here.)

Inmagic is launching an idea management system called IdeaNet this week, claiming to deliver the "right mix of culture, process, and tools to support open and fluid lines of communication across organizational communities and silos." That's quite a mouthful, not to mention a lot of Big Ideas right there.

What is part Nimble.com, part Constant Contact, part Web site authoring tool, part SurveyMonkey, part wiki all rolled into one? The answer is a new service called GreenRope, available now.

This is a Swiss Army Knife of the Web. There are more tools here than you can possibly review in a short article, and the idea is to put in one place everything you need to get started online.

Teambox, yet another social stream project management tool, has come out with some new enhancements to its service. If you are still using email to collaborate and send documents back and forth, maybe it is time to take a look at what they offer.

This is a crowded market, with tools from Yammer, Basecamp and Socialtext just to name a few. The core difference is that Teambox is both a collaboration tool and task management system integrated into a single tool. The tasks to manage are in line with all the communication and discussions.

Socialtext today announced three enhancements to its microblogging and enterprise social networking platform to help visualize and maintain workflows.

Jive Software, the company that has been one of the leaders in collaboration software, has acquired OffiSync, the company that makes social media add-ons to Microsoft Outlook. You gotta love a company that starts out its corporate overview by saying "old business processes and technologies suck" right on its website.

Socialtext announced today that it will release a virtual appliance that can be deployed as part of an on-premise or in the public cloud using VMware. The virtual appliance will provide all the features of the Socialtext software-as-a-service and its managed appliance.

There's mounting in interest in private, hybrid and "virtual private" clouds as companies look to take advantage of cloud elasticity without relinquishing too much control of mission critical systems. Socialtext cites Gartner researching finding that "76 percent of IT departments are planning to invest in private cloud strategies by 2012."

Today co-founder, president and chairman of Socialtext Ross Mayfield announced on his blog that he is stepping down from his day-to-day duties at Socialtext and joining SlideShare as vice presdent of business development. Mayfield told us about the move: "SlideShare is obviously different but what it has in common with Socialtext is being at the boundary between consumer and enterprise, which is my favorite place to play." Mayfield has been an adviser to SlideShare for the past four years. He will remain the chairman of the board of directors at Socialtext.

Socialtext was one of the first companies in the enterprise 2.0 space, and the first to offer an enterprise wiki. "Whatever your enterprise 2.0 / social business poison, our industry owes a lot to Ross for persistently questioning how we work," Sameer Patel of the Sovos Group tweeted in response to the announcement. We discussed Socialtext's role in the development of enterprise social software earlier this week.