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AllThingsD's Liz Gannes has sources telling her that Rapportive, the best thing that ever happened to email, has been acquired by LinkedIn. We've heard the scuttlebutt, too. Our friends at LinkedIn won't say a word. Rapportive co-founder Martin Kleppmann "can't comment," and CEO Rahul Vohra has been quiet on Twitter lately. That's all we know.

So we aren't reporting that it has happened, but we're bracing ourselves in case it does. Since Rapportive is the most useful plug-in ever, we're concerned about something bad happening to it. But if it had to be somebody, an acquisition by LinkedIn could be a good choice.

In the space of a year Precise, Software, a midsized provider of application management technologies based in Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv, Israel completely transformed its IT infrastructure to virtualization and cloud software, saving more than $2 million of its annual IT costs. This reduction came through cutting half of their IT staff and closely examining a variety of other technologies.

Today Zoho announced a makeover for its venerable (my, how time flies) CRM SaaS service, including new features and a new UI. The company also stated that its software is used by 5.5 million users and has 25,000 CRM customers. The features are all available immediately and the existing pricing remains the same.

Paul Greenberg's engaging experiment in highlighting CRM vendors from around the world has concluded today, with the announcement of the winners of his CRM Idol contest. You can view the finalist entries on his website here. There were entries from all over the world, and today two finalists were announced.

With the announcement by Oracle of their acquisition of RightNow earlier this week, it has brought about some strange bedfellows on how their mutual customers can connect up disparate CRM and other SaaS-based customer support systems. Indeed, at the center of the integration between Oracle and RightNow's technologies lies a product that is sold by IBM called WebSphere Cast Iron Cloud Integration. Let's look a bit more closely at what is going on here.

If anyone knew the real reason behind the much-hyped kerfuffle a few weeks ago between Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and his would-be OpenWorld conference guest, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, she kept it to herself rather skillfully. As it turns out, Oracle executives held an all-hands-on-deck meeting late last week; and this morning, the obvious Easter-egg-shaped clue everyone missed emerged as if it had just been laid: Oracle has entered into an agreement to purchase Salesforce's fiercest competitor in the CRM space, RightNow.

Just three short weeks ago, a relatively new player in the CRM space, Assistly, made its biggest debut at the Dreamforce conference by integrating its social CRM service with Salesforce.com. The result was the beginning of a cloud-based customer service portal that lets Salesforce users initiate direct contact with customers, aided by Assistly's innovative "agents."

Days later, Microsoft unveiled an addition to its Dynamics AX 2012 product that should have surprised no one: a feature that gives salespeople direct insight into customers' Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn activity, using Outlook as the portal. Today, Salesforce has countered that move by purchasing Assistly outright for $50 million in cash.

With more than 100 vendors offering integrated discussion forum/wiki/news feed apps, Gartner has produced its report of this marketplace, calling it Social CRM. "Most vendors remain relatively small and unprofitable," says the report authored by Adam Sarner and others called Magic Quadrant for Social CRM. (You can't really look at the report unless you are a Gartner customer, though.)

InQuira, providers of Web-based self-service tools among other CRM solutions, took to the streets of San Francisco to find out the level of customer satisfaction when it comes to using online help for products and services. Not surprisingly, they found that almost all of the 300 people they randomly stopped on the street weren't happy with their searches.

The survey asked people when they purchase something new, where do they go to get information on how something works. More than 90% who use online sites had to compose multiple queries to get an answer to their question, and about half were satisfied with their answer before abandoning the Web and calling an 800 number for support.

Oracle announced last month that they are acquiring InQuira and integrating its products into their own line of CRM solutions.

This week we saw lots of new apps and activity around Salesforce, as expected, given its Dreamforce conference. But it reminded us of why it will continue to dominate the CRM space, and why Microsoft's own CRM offerings - despite some solid foundations and active users - still don't measure up by comparison.

(This article is a companion piece to analysis by Scott Fulton, which can be found here.)