ReadWriteWeb

Today Novell released its 2012 version of its email software GroupWise, and the announcement was greeted by most with a big yawn. GroupWise? Seems so last century. (Actually, the last updates to the software were for version 8 back in 2008-2010.) According to one analyst, "GroupWise has 10,000 customers and is used by 47 of the 50 US state governments." It has been a distant third to Exchange and Lotus Notes for a while, and many GroupWise customers have switched over to Google Apps in the past several years.

Those of us who have used email alot, (see my email memories story here) have often wished we could know if our recipients have opened and read our messages. And while there have been read-receipts on various email services for many years, until now there hasn't been a general-purpose tool that can track when someone actually opens your messages. Enter Zendio with their plug-in for Outlook. And while it works, it is probably the creepiest solution that I've seen.

In a very short period of time - just the last 18 months - Salesforce.com has risen from "up-and-comer," straight through "challenger" status, to the potential out-and-out leader in workforce software. Every move it has made so far, including the December 2010 purchase of open cloud platform Heroku, has been part of a well-played strategy thus far to build leveraged platforms in cloud-based services the way Microsoft leveraged its platforms for office applications... only somewhat faster.

This morning, Salesforce has fired a volley straight at the heart of Microsoft's leveraged tower. Do.com - a free, Heroku-based service coupled with Gmail, but enabled for all e-mail users - is a cloud-based, socially-oriented task management and collaboration platform aimed not just at Salesforce's typical office user, but the general public. It serves not only as a group planning tool for any scale of project, including the smallest scale (e.g., remembering to pick up groceries), but as a kind of cloud desktop for collaborating around Google Docs.

Last year we told you about a few plugins for Microsoft Outlook users with Gmail envy. Here's another one for that list: Priority Inbox for Outlook.

This is a third party plugin not associated with either Microsoft or Google that can organize e-mail in a way similar to Priority Inbox feature in Gmail. It costs $19.90 and is available for Outlook 2007 and 2010.

The Palo Alto Research Center is releasing new semantic technology, based on Xerox PARC IP, in the form of an Outlook plugin called Meshin. At first glance, Meshin looks like the ugly stepsister to a similar Outlook tool called Xobni, as it also loads into an email sidebar window, displaying sections dedicated to recent conversations and a summary of attachments shared back and forth via email, among other things. But what makes Meshin different is the engine powering it underneath: a semantic technology that uses "natural language processing" to understand entities, how they connect and what they mean.

Invites available! Click through for link.

Xobni, the contacts- and email-management company, is using the Gmail API we reported on earlier today, to create a developer platform for killing two birds with one stone. Using Xobni, developers will be able to make contextual gadgets for Gmail and easily port them over to Outlook.

In a blog post, the company's CEO, Jeff Bonforte, announced a Xobni for Outlook Developer Preview "that will allow any developer to test their Gmail contextual gadget in Outlook 2003, 2007, and 2010 (32-bit and 64-bit)."

Everybody is getting in the game. Google just announced Buzz, its social feed add-on to Gmail, last week and today Microsoft is bringing the feed to Outlook. Microsoft first announced its social media add-on, the Outlook Social Connector, last November but today begins the public beta period for LinkedIn for Outlook. The company has also announced partnerships with Facebook and Myspace.

Outlook users can now use email plug-in Liaise to automatically extract action items, delegation and priority levels from the free text of email conversations. This is software that's so cool it makes me jealous of Windows users.

Liaise launched in September and won the Peoples' Choice Award for Enterprise Products at DEMO but is available to the public at large for the first time today.

Xobni, the Outlook plugin that reveals the hidden social network in your inbox, has today launched a business service called Xobni Enterprise. With this, I.T. administrators are being given new tools to deploy and manage the plugin across corporate desktops. In addition, the company is offering customizable extensions for popular enterprise systems including Salesforce CRM, SharePoint, Microsoft Dynamics, and others. It can even tap into a company's own information store saved in an LDAP database like Microsoft's Active Directory or it can pull from other internal websites.

The French Government's public finance department will switch 130,000 desktop PC's to Mozilla's email and calendar applications. Mozilla's Thunderbird email service, Lightning Calendar and an open-source groupware will replace IBM Lotus Notes and Microsoft Office.

The move signals how more government agencies from around the world are dropping enterprise accounts with major vendors to cut down on costs and get better license agreements.They are turning to open-source providers and companies like Google that can offer email and services such as Google Docs.