ReadWriteWeb

For all of the excitement generated by the wide range of Web-based business collaboration tools out there, you'd think most companies would be touting the revolutionary effects that these products have had.

Instead, most companies are seeing very few, if any, benefits from online collaboration software, at least according to a new report by Forrester. Of the survey's respondents, 64% said they saw anywhere from zero to four benefits after implementing collaboration software.

Social CRM, as a concept, has been around for five or six years now, according to Paul Greenberg and Estaban Kolsky, two analysts interviewed on the subject by Dennis Howlett. But we're only just now starting to understand the concept, and it may be several years before we have any real success stories in the area. Never the less, we can already learn a few lessons from the pioneers of social CRM.

Talker, a Web-based group chat application geared toward remote teams is now available for free, having been rolled into the Teambox collaboration suite.

Talker is one of the many group messaging apps that seem to be coming out of the woodwork lately. It's a browser-based chat environment that supports inline images and videos and has a slew of plugins and integrations available via its REST API. Starting today, its price tag has been removed.

Times are changing: while corporate management all around the world worries about the distractibility and entitlement of the next generation of workers, Microsoft appears set to embrace the future warmly. The next version of Microsoft Word and the rest of the Office 15 suite will include some features very familiar to the kids these days.

"For Office 15 we're building new products to deliver integration of instant messaging/presence with social networks such as Facebook," the company wrote in a job posting put online today. Stephen Chapman first reported on the news at ZDNet and said he found it bewildering. Not everyone feels that way, though; to some observers it makes perfect sense.

Starting now, Google is rolling out a new commenting system to all Google Docs users except those Google Apps customers who opt-out through the new system we told you about yesterday. The company expects to have the new feature fully deployed by the end of the day.

Google is attempting to address a common document collaboration problem: how to manage comments and conversations around a document. "Document comments aren't really conducive to a conversation," says Google Docs Group Product Manager Scott Johnston. "So we end up having conversations in e-mail instead." But when you use e-mail, conversations end up separate from the document. And sometimes those conversations are as important as the document itself.

So how is Google trying to solve this problem?

Sazneo, a real-time collaboration Web app, has launched an iPhone-friendly mobile version, allowing team members to stay in touch while on-the-go.

Sazneo is a relatively new group chat app that enables businesses to break conversations down into different channels, which can include team members as well as people from outside the organization. Within each chat channel, there's a repository for file uploads so team members can easily exchange documents, graphics and other files.

Social media maven Maria Ogneva announced today that she is joining Yammer next week as head of community. "To me, this is not just another job. In many ways, I feel like everything I've done up until this point was to give me the tools and skills to do this job effectively," she writes. "Enterprises face challenges I can sink my teeth into."

Ogneva tells us the role head of community role will encompass several areas, both internal and external. She'll be working on internal initiatives to improve community and collaboration within Yammer. "I'm going to provide a lot of best practices and process around blogging, tweeting, participation in events, etc," she says. She'll also be "Collaborating with other departments to make social media engagement a natural part of the team's lives, if they choose to participate."

Externally, she'll be working with customers to learn how to improve Yammer. She'll also be creating content such as case studies.

The history of collaboration is the subject of another infographic from Socialcast. A previous infographic the company did late last year explored how to measure the effectiveness of social technologies inside the enterprise.

This one explores collaboration starting with a quote from Charles Darwin about communications. It goes from there to explore the growth of collaboration; the types of workers in the U.S. workforce and the definition of a good worker.

Last year, when we asked whether Facebook could break into the enterprise world, Constellation Research CEO and principal analyst R "Ray" Wang said "I'd see LinkedIn in this category first because they have the trust of the corporate and professional communities." LinkedIn may never get into that business, but there a few ways you can use LinkedIn for working with teams today. It's become a popular choice as a login system, so it's a natural fit for project collaboration software-as-a-service providers.

Box (formerly known as Box.net) announced a new version today. It's revamping the user interface, adding discussion tabs to documents, activity streams and an app market. The new version will be rolled out over the next 30 days. It's also working with VMware to integrate Active Directory with Box in order to appeal to larger enterprises.