What's even better is that you can click on the notification in the Activity Stream to see all the relevant details. If the item was an image, for example, you can preview it or download the original. For blog posts and wiki pages, you can click to read the item that was updated. Plus, you can download any files that have been added straight from the Activity Stream to your desktop.

However, the cyn.in desktop client isn't just about automated notifications - it allows for those personal updates, too. But this is the enterprise, mind you, so we're not calling them "tweets" here - they are "status updates" instead. Guided by the prompt "What are you doing?" anyone can quickly set their status update which is then sent into the Activity Stream to update everyone else.

Taking a page from Jaiku's book, the client also includes a threaded discussions feature. Any item in the stream can be commented on whether it's an automated update or a personal status update. The replies can be viewed in a pop-up sidebar to the right of the original Activity Stream, just as with photos, wikis, and blog updates. Like FriendFeed, when someone comments on an item, that item bubbles up to the top so everyone is immediately alerted.

As any Twitter user could tell you, no microblogging product would be complete without search, and cyn.in is no exception. When you need to find something that had been posted before and has since fallen off the page, you can enter in a query straight into the desktop client itself. The results returned are ranked for you according to the percentage match and you can scroll through them just as you can with the Activity Stream.

The cyn.in client is beautiful implementation of how microblogging could (and perhaps should) work for businesses, but it's the client's integration with the cyn.in team collaboration suite that makes it so worthwhile. Of course, the decision to move away from your company's current collaboration suite is not one to be made lightly, so you should review the suite's features before deciding if it's right for you.

Other enterprise microblogging clients include Yammer, Present.ly, and Status, but none offer an integrated collaboration suite, too. Cyn.in is open source, but it can also be purchased as a hosted service or as an enterprise appliance.

GroupSwim is a company whose SaaS collaboration solution uses semantic technology to automatically tag and rate content including discussions, emails, documents, wikis, and more. As an Enterprise 2.0 Launch Pad finalist, the company was honored for making enterprise team collaboration fun to use thanks to features like thumbs up/thumbs down voting and its ability to monitor your favorite topics.

One of the best features in the latest version of GroupSwim is the new integrated wiki application which puts GroupSwim in more direct competition with services like Central Desktop, existing SharePoint implementations, and Confluence and less directly with other wiki providers like Wetpaint, for example, as well as with other group collaboration suites like Grou.ps.

With GroupSwim's wiki solution, you don't have to learn any sort of technical markup code. Instead, their WYSIWYG editor is easy to use and lets anyone write, share, and collaborate on documents with other team members. You can insert files, images, widgets, and tables into the wiki and if you mess something up, content can be quickly recovered thanks to the wiki's versioning feature. The wiki also offers built in access control permissions so admins can specify who is allowed to edit pages.

Another change to GroupSwim is the addition of system APIs. Where before they offered only a couple (single sign-on and member management), they now have a whole host of APIs to let you better integrate their software with other third party systems your company may be using.

Other features included in the latest update are:

• Redesigned home page for feed style information across all groups
• Hidden groups that are invisible unless user is a member of the group
• New email notification permissions let you tune who can send email notifications
• Improved auto-tagging capability
• Insert files and images directly into discussions and wiki pages
• Various performance enhancements

Why GroupSwim Works

So far, GroupSwim has been so successful in making a name for themselves in the Enterprise 2.0 space, first getting selected as an Enterprise 2.0 LaunchPad finalist and more recently being selected as one of the 12 finalists out of some 85 companies to be a Preview Company at the SIIA OnDemand Conference in November.

We think the reason for the company's success goes beyond the software's feature set alone. What's really appealing about GroupSwim is how easy it is to use. After having spent years editing and uploading files to SharePoint, using GroupSwim is a breath of fresh air - it doesn't feel like work. And that's quite the accomplishment because behind the software's simple Web 2.0 interface, they offer a robust feature set which includes things like role-based permissions, private groups, support for rich media, the ability to embed both Zoho and Google Docs, the ability to add files via email, document previews on the web, suggestive search, and more.  How they managed to cram in all those features while making the software appear so easy is beyond us.

For more info on how GroupSwim works, check out this post which delves into the details of the software including its semantic features. However, the best way to get a feel for how GroupSwim works is to visit their demo sites. On this page, there are three different sites already set up for you to explore.