Enterprise 2.0 News

Virtual PBX systems emerged long ago and gradually taking the market share from traditional PBX. This kind of service is even available for consumers - for example, Google Voice - the personal virtual PBX, which handles incoming calls, SMS and voicemail. But the main drawback of such services (for business) is that they are designed for interaction with people, but not with applications. At the same time, to improve business performance, each call should be at least logged in some application (e.g. in CRM system), and better - initiate some automated operations (for example, open the card of calling customer or solve customer problems by the interactive voice menu). Therefore, recently the API-voice services, which allow to easily integrate telephony into web-applications, appeared. Twilio - is one of them. ***

As Skype CEO, Jonathan Christensen, promised last year, this world's most popular communication service is now available for developers as a "pure" service. Yesterday SkypeKit SDK was released. It allows any software and device to use the Skype network for instant messaging, status control, audio and video chat without the need to install the proprietary client. SkypeKit supports Windows, Linux and Mac. It includes the Skype's "VoIP heart" - Silk codec, which was opened for developers a year ago. However, the bad news is that SkypeKit can't be used by web-applications and mobile applications. ***

Google adds new office tools for working with documents. First is text recognition (OCR) in Google Docs - it can recognize text on images and PDF-files. Besides English, it supports French, Italian, German, Spanish. Second is the plug-in for viewing PDF files in the Google Chrome browser (you can add it on the page chrome: / / plugins). Thus, Google consistently continues its friendship with Adobe (after adding the default Flash support in Chrome). ***

Late last year, Cisco introduced the social intranet system with a long name Cisco Enterprise Collaboration Platform and this solution hit the Top 10 Enterprise 2.0 products in 2009 by ReadWriteWeb. Now Cisco starts selling the system under the new name - Cisco Quad. The functionality of the system at first glance seems to be traditional for enterprise social software: user profiles, personal start pages, microblogs and communities (for group collaboration). But of course, Cisco added to the system its main feature - video. From anywhere in the system, where user's avatar appears, you can see his online status, send him an instant message or start a video conference. And, of course, Cisco Quad is closely integrated with Cisco Webex web conferencing service and Cisco Unified Communications . ***

Although Zoho is positioned as a SaaS vendor for small business, it doesn't forget about the enterprise customers. The new features in Zoho Wiki 2.0 primarily target large companies. First of all, that are workspaces, which are useful for creating separate wikis for company departments. Each workspace has its own administration panel, security settings and appearance (customizable at CSS level). The access control system (which is also actual for large companies) was dramatically improved. Now you can set the detailed access rights at page, workspace or wiki level for employees, user groups, domains or customers. ***

Zuora, the service that provides SaaS companies a convenient way of collecting monthly payments, will join the Microsoft Windows Azure  Technology Adoption Program (TAP) as the first on-demand billing and subscription management provider to be chosen by Microsoft. So the SaaS services on Azure platform will be able to easily integrate their products with the billing system to offer customers a range of flexible payment plans (for example, depending on the disk space, number of users, number of projects, etc.) to its customers, send invoices, accept payments through different payment systems and create various sales reports. Interestingly, that Zuora is backed by Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, the company that Microsoft is fighting with. ***

Socialwok (known as the "social layer for Google Apps") like the online organizer Producteev, shows us the new meaning of "cross-platform" definition. Realizing that users most of time spend in email clients (such as Outlook and GMail), Socialwok simply decided to get inside these email clients. Socialwok was one of the first services to use the new GMail API and has created the gadget that can be expanded on the entire GMail workspace (see screenshot) and allows to post messages to microblogs, share Google Docs files, images, Youtube videos and events from Google Calendar, search for Google Docs, post to Twitter or Facebook right from your GMail interface. ***

We all remember the saga of GDrive - a mythical online file storage, which Google (as was supposed) developed within 2 years, and then it just added the opportunity to upload any files to Google Docs. Along with this opportunity, Memeo Connect (the service for syncing Google Docs with a local folder) appeared. It seemed that the dream about GDrive had come true. But sometimes details decide everything. Until now, to download a file to Google-account with Memeo Connect or to open file from there it was necessary to launch Memeo Connect software. Because of this little issue many Google users switched to DropBox. But today Memeo Connect has released version 2.0 and its main feature is GDrive - the local drive, which exists on your computer and works like any other local drive. ***

As we know, Zoho (before it became the SaaS-giant) has developed ManageEngine ServiceDesk, which is still one of its main revenue sources. Therefore, the lack of Service Desk tool in Zoho's SaaS suite was pretty strange. Today, Zoho decided to fix this issue and kill two birds with one stone. Two years ago Zoho launched Zoho Creator Marketplace that allows to build online apps in visual designer (in Zoho Creator) and sell them to Zoho users. So, now to draw attention to this marketplace, Zoho launched Zoho Creator Helpdesk - the helpdesk system for small business, created in Zoho Creator. ***

One of the Google Chrome OS developers noted in Chromium Google Group, that this lightweight OS for netbooks will include a terminal client, which enables Chrome-netbooks to run not only web-applications, but also legacy desktop applications. I.e. netbooks with Chrome OS will be able to connect to another computer (or server) with a terminal server and run applications from this computer in a browser. Similarly the well-known Windows Remote Desktop works. What operating systems will the Chrome OS terminal server support - is unknown, but most likely Windows and Windows Server will be in the list . ***