ReadWriteWeb

We've discovered several more vendors since we first looked at the enterprise questions and answers space earlier this year. It's a young market, but one that's heating up quick. There are pure Q&A vendors like the ones we mentioned before, and several other social platforms have added Q&A features to existing products.

Here's a look at nine companies that are trying to improve knowledge management through Q&A software.

Convofy, the new enterprise collaboration platform we covered last month, opens to the public today. It's launching using a freemium model similar to Yammer's, so you can try it out for free.

We got a demo from CEO Faizan Buzdar yesterday, and it's a solid product. It's unique, fast and has clear value for teams collaborating with visual media such as photos, video or data visualizations. It has a few discrete apps that run on its platform already, including an image gallery and media player. Users can comment on specific elements of an image, website or video. A nice touch is the ability to comment on a portion of a video and create a link that will start the video at the relevant point.

Asana is a company created by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and ex-Googler Justin Rosenstein. Its aim is nothing short of reinventing how we collaborate. It's a lofty goal, especially with so many Enterprise 2.0 tools aiming to do just that. But it has deep pockets, high profile advisers, a strong vision and lots of buzz.

The team has been toiling on the project in secret for two years, but have finally started talking about it over the past few months. In February, the company held an open house where Rosenstein demoed and explained the product. It's currently in private beta, but don't hold your breath waiting for an invite.

Here's what you should know about the company and its product.

"Yammer and Salesforce Chatter are gonna have some significant new competition starting Monday," Robert Scoble tweeted over the weekend. It turns out he was talking about Convofy, a new product from the Adobe and LMKR funded startup Scrybe.

In response to Scoble, Spigit VP of Product Hutch Carpenter tweeted: "Given incumbents, better have some 9x secret sauce or be a big vendor." I couldn't have said it better myself.

Well, Scrybe isn't a big vendor. So does it have some secret sauce?

eXo offers an open source Java framework for enterprise social software tools. It includes reusable components for building content management systems, user management tools, activity streams, e-mail integrations, mashups and more.

This week it announced Cloud IDE, a Web-based development environment for cloud applications.

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?

Seesmic and Yammer announced today a plugin that brings Yammer's enterprise microblogging and social networking tool to Seesmic's desktop social media application. In addition to making Yammer more appealing to companies that also use external social media, the integration helps Seesmic differentiate itself from other social media dashboards by offering more internal collaboration options.

Seesmic users can download the plugin from the marketplace section of the Seesmic Desktop app. The Seesmic Web client and various mobile clients do not yet have Yammer support.

Google Cloud Connect is a Microsoft Office plugin released today by Google. It has been available for testers since November, but it is now generally available. It syncs a user's Office docs with their Google Docs, and adds a toolbar for sharing documents right into Office. We've been asking for offline access for Google Docs for years now, and this is a step towards that.

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.

As part of the Enterprise Startup Spotlight I've asked each submitter to provide a one sentence explanation of the company and an explanation of how it's different from the competition. I'm beginning to think I should have collapsed both of those fields to two words.

Why? Because so many of the strongest enterprise 2.0 companies can be summed up in just two words. Here are 15 products explained in two words each.