ReadWriteWeb

"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?

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?

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.

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.

This report from Qwest Business examines the case for unified communications and lays out some best practices for UC deployment. Qwest emphasizes the need for an adequate network to support UC deployments: "The network is the platform that connects all forms of communications, and if your network can't support these new technologies, intra- and inter-company collaboration is impossible."

Salesforce.com announced today that the free Chatter.com software-as-a-service will be generally available January 31. Chatter.com makes the core features of Salesforce.com's enterprise social software offering Chatter available for free. Chatter.com users will have nearly all the features that paid Salesforce.com users have, with the exception of reporting dashboards and access to the AppExchange marketplace. A few new features are being rolled out to all Chatter users as well.

Twitter-style @replies and trending topics and Facebook-style "likes" are all being added to both Chatter.com and regular Chatter users.

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.

As 2010 draws to a close we're taking a look at a few enterprise startups that show promise and that we haven't covered on ReadWriteEnterprise.

Podio is a highly customizable Web-based enterprise collaboration application. Like Huddle it emphasizes external collaboration as well as internal collaboration. Podio's distinguishing features are its large internal app store and its app builder. End-users can easily add or modify existing apps from the more than 2,000 apps available in the app store, or build new ones using a point and click interface.

SnapLogic is a cloud integration platform. It offers an app store (called the SnapStore) of connectors (called snaps) for integrating services like Box, Netsuite, and Salesforce.com. Unlike Jive or Salesforce.com, which offer services in addition to an app store, SnapLogic is focused on being a platform for connecting other services. Customers can also build their own snaps through a visual programming interface.

SnapLogic rigorously vets submissions to its app store, and applications are sandboxed. SnapLogic Server has support for both Active Directory and LDAP, enabling enterprises to integrate services with their existing access controls.

David Coleman of Collaborative Strategies and Sameer Patel of Sovos Group had a discussion moderated by JP Finnell of Mobility Partners at the Net:Work conference last week in San Francisco. Here Coleman and Patel talk about enterprise 2.0 adoption, the business value of social media in the enterprise and the role of millennials in the workforce.