ReadWriteWeb

We've written before about Brainshark's mobile slide show app and today they have announced the availability of SlideShark Team Edition. It adds admin controls, team-wide content sharing, and usage analytics to the individual features found previously.

With Team Edition, sales teams for example can share their slide decks as they tote about their iPads around the countryside. Individuals can still upload PowerPoint slides for their own use too.

British software vendor Sazneo has launched a version of their chat software that you can now embed in any Web service or application. We last wrote about Sazneo about a year ago. "Sazneo Embed is ideal for companies that love the idea but are reluctant to introduce a new application onto busy desktops that already have email, instant messaging or social media tools." said Brett Davis, CEO. "Many of our clients have already started putting Sazneo into their internal applications and a number of SaaS businesses are now embedding it into their own products to offer a group messaging capability to their clients."

One of the unexpected perks of starting work at ReadWriteWeb in December? No more Yammer.

This, of course, is more of a company culture problem than anything Yammer can control. Yammer continues to grow, and the enterprise social network space is where companies who are conceding truly social networking dominance to Facebook, Google+ and Twitter, will seek to grow.

Google Plus got a bunch of new features today, many of them involving Hangouts, the video chat feature. This is not the only social network with video chat in town, but Hangouts always had some stand-out features. First of all, they can be public, so anyone can see one in their stream and join in, which is a very honest interpretation of the word "social." They also support two-way chat for up to 10 people, which can be chaotic, but often in a fun way.

Today's update brought Hangouts to mobile devices, and it added "On Air" mode to allow users to broadcast to the public (once On Air opens to everyone, that is). All these features sound like fun. But the killer app on Google Plus is more about work than play. Google Docs is now available live over Hangouts, making live, face-to-face collaboration possible on the Web for free.

Today, Box announced a tablet-optimized Android app, a PlayBook app (the company's first native app for any BlackBerry platform) and a new HTML5 mobile site. The Android version replaces the company's existing Android app and will work with both smartphones and tablets, optimizing the view depending on the device.

More interesting than the actual app announcements, Box CEO Aaron Levie revealed that the company has seen a 600% increase in enterprise sales regarding mobile. And yes, that's specifically enterprise sales, not overall sales. For example, Proctor and Gamble just became a Box customer based largely on the company's mobile support.

Mobile and how it changes the workforce remains high on Forrester's research agenda with one of its latest reports: The Forrester Wave: Mobile Collaboration, Q3 2011. This is the first Wave for mobile collaboration.

Forrester looked at a number of factors, including enterprise readiness and cross-platform support. The firm only considered cloud-based apps with native applications available for more than one mobile operating system, which caused several vendors' products to be left out (including Microsoft SharePoint and RIM BlackBerry Messenger) to be left out.

LinkedIn is considering building a social networking tool for the workplace, along the lines of Yammer and similar tools, CEO Jeff Weiner said in the company's first earnings call earlier today.

If it does so, LinkedIn will be competing with dozens of other companies, including IBM, Jive, Microsoft (which has some social networking capabilities built into SharePoint), Socialtext TIBCO and VMware (which recently acquired SocialCast). And as we've mentioned, some see Google Plus eventually being a workplace tool as part of Google Apps.

With so many options already on the market, are you interested in the idea of using LinkedIn as an internal social network?

We've always liked Socialcast here at ReadWriteWeb, but until it's been lacking a major feature: the ability to invite external collaborators. While some companies - such as Huddle, Simplybox and newcomer Podio - have made external collaboration a key point, many major vendors have lagged in this area. So we're glad to see external collaboration become a focus for Socialcast, which announced today a few new features.

Alcatel-Lucent is the latest company to throw its hat into the enterprise unified communications and collaboration ring with its announcement today of the Visual Collaboration suite. It features cross-platform video and virtual whiteboarding solutions.

The video conferencing aspect will work on desktop PCs as well as dedicated video conferencing tools from vendors such as SMART Technologies, RADVISION and Lifesize.

Sameer Patel of the Sovos Group wrote an excellent blog post on the way organizations tend to deal with exceptions to process.

"The sheer impracticality of channeling exceptions in any scalable way to get the right answers has plagued organizations for ever. Each exception requires a different set of experts or problem owners, some known but most unknown, and often spread across a global footprint at large organizations."