ReadWriteWeb

We haven't written much about TIBCO's enterprise social media tool tibbr since a year ago. But they have interesting news, including updates to the service, that they are announcing today with v3.5, scheduled to be available next month.

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.

Today Socialcast has announced the beta of Strides, its first big launch since VMware acquired them earlier this summer. Just connecting everyone on an internal social network isn't enough - everyone has to actually use the network for their work activities. And Strides is bringing a lightweight Web 2.0 form of project management, layering it on top of the social networking tool.

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.

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."

When I started professionally covering the enterprise 2.0/social business space just over a year ago it was all very exciting. I had personally witnessed how valuable a workplace microblog/activity stream could be, and I loved learning about all the different companies and the ideas floating around.

But it's easy to get bored. Despite all the talk about the consumerization of the enterprise, things still move slowly (heck, things don't really change that much day to day, week to week in the consumer space either). The same few problems seem to be discussed again and again: adoption, security, process, semantics etc. As Dennis Howlett recently wrote: "much of what we are hearing in the social space we've heard repeated for at least the last three years. In other words, precious little real progress."

So it's always nice to see some incremental progress, and this week brought at least two noteworthy product updates: one from Harmon.ie and one from tibbr. Each company was already doing something interesting, and each has taken its products to the next level.

Constellation Research CEO and principal analyst R "Ray" Wang recently gave a talk called "Why Enterprise Software Sucks and How Disruptive Technologies Converge to Change This" at the AMPLIFYfestival. It's a good talk introducing many of the concepts we cover here frequently.

Wang started the talk in a pretty interesting area: what, specifically, are the problems with enterprise software that enterprise 2.0, social business, gamification etc. is trying to solve? He asked people from the audience why they disliked their enterprise software. Some of the answers were: it's slow, it takes too long to implement, it doesn't look good, change is slow, user experience always take a back seat and it's not personal.

Wang points out that in consumer technology, the opposite is usually true.

There were a few updates to Google Docs last week. Discussions, a new feature we covered previously, received some improvements - most notably, the ability to see how many times a document has been viewed. Google Docs also added a new font, made it easier to restore deleted sites and the spell checker gained an additional feature.

It's almost time for another Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, which means it's time for another Enterprise 2.0 Launchpad contest. The conference will be held June 20 to 23, and winners will be announced on the last day. Past contest winners have included Baydin, CubeTree and Meetzi.

The four finalists for the contest have been announced. Let's take a look.