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Users of desktop-to-cloud synchronization service Nomadesk can now edit files in the cloud with Zoho. Nomadesk users can right-click on a document, spreadsheet or presentation on the web-based Nomadesk dashboard and click "edit" to open the file in Zoho. Changes are then synchronized to the user's desktop.

A familiar character has entered the stage for Salesforce.com. Attorney David Boies is bringing his celebrated fame back again to take on Microsoft, the company he defeated ten years ago in the U.S. Justice Department's landmark anti-trust case against the software giant.

Salesforce.com filed suit today, claiming that Microsoft is violating patents across its .Net environment and Sharepoint. Salesforce.com claims Microsoft should have known about the risk of infringement, claiming the violations are patently obvious.

With all the clatter about the new enterprise collaboration platforms from big players like Salesforce.com's Chatter, Cisco's Quad, and SAP's StreamWork, we thought it would be a good time to look at a few smaller players doing big things: Feng Office, MangoSpring and we+.

Curverider, the company behind the open-source social network Elgg, is launching a hosted enterprise social networking solution called Elgg.com. The product, in private beta until September, will compete directly with other social enterprise vendors such as Socialtext, Yammer, and Salesforce.com's Chatter.

Enterprise SaaS and PaaS (platform as a service) vendor Netsuite announced the availability of Netsuite Manufacturing Edition last week. The company's Manufacturing Edition is aimed at mid-sized manufacturers and provides support for "multi-company, multi-plant, multi-location and multi-currency" enterprises. The product was built by manufacturing management software company Rootsock Software on Netsuite's SuiteCloud platform, which opens a new vertical market to Netsuite and escalates its competition with SAP.

Practice Fusion, one of the SaaS electronic medical record (EMR) pioneers, has announced a Dell-based hardware system bundle for doctors spinning up to its free cloud-based EMR system. Ryan Howard, CEO of Practice Fusion, walked us through what it means to bring the cloud to a small clinic - ground zero in the medical industry's transition to electronic medical records.

The proposition for doctors is simple: The U.S. federal government has proposed incentives to move to electronic systems. A doctor can qualify for $44,000 or $66,000 in federal stimulus dollars for completing the migration in the next several years.

VoltDB, an open-source "next generation" database, graduated from beta last week. The company, under the leadership of Postgres and Ingres co-founder Mike Stonebraker, claims its product is extremely scalable and 45-times faster than traditional database products. VoltDB is targeting enterprises such as software-as-a-service providers, financial traders, online businesses or any organization that requires "systems with large, fast-growing transaction volumes." VoltDB is one of many projects trying to re-invent the database.

Although by no means a new technology, cloud computing retains the buzz as one of the latest innovative - and potentially transformative - elements of the industry. But there remains quite a bit of confusion about what exactly is meant by cloud computing, often making the question of whether or not your startup should be in the cloud difficult to answer.

A natural curiosity surfaces when a company from a different era starts using API's and leveraging the cloud. It shows how fast the world is changing as Web oriented architectures become more predominant.

Mastercard, Blockbuster and Pitney Bowes are all companies we've reported about in the past few weeks that are reinventing themselves to some degree by adopting API infrastructures and developing services and platforms.

SAP's Business ByDesign (BYD) will be released at the end of July, marking the company's next steps into the world of subscription services for enterprise customers.

It certainly is a small step into the SaaS world for SAP. And it has been a long time in coming for the company.