NewsGator Social Sites 2.7 … NewsGator released version 2.7 of Social Sites, its social networking add-on for SharePoint. It adds a new idea management tool. “Called Social Sites Ideas, the new solution captures, vets and advances fresh, new employee suggestions for improving business results. It is ideal for product development, cost reduction programs, business process improvements, customer service enhancements, going green and more. NewsGator Social Sites 2.7 is the latest version of the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007-based enterprise social computing product that connects people with colleagues and content in topic-based communities.” More
– CIO Magazine: from Oliver Young, “Wrapping together collaboration and innovation management makes a lot of sense. It’s not enough to have an idea. You have to vet it, explore it, work with people, expand on it. That’s a collaborative process.“

CMSWatch on Open Text + Vignette … Alan from CMS Watch provides his analysis of the Open Text acquisition of Vignette. “I don’t like the deal or the strategy at all. Here’s why….. In the corporate realm (as every other) there is only so much love to go around. And when when you have a portfolio of overlapping products something has to give. You can either try to somehow glue all these new technology codebases and offerings together with all your existing products — or you leave them alone to run as standalone solutions. Gluing them together is just not feasible on this scale, it cannot be done regardless of what the marketing from Open Text (or Autonomy in it’s turn) might like you to believe. All you can really do is to slash costs where possible, leave the technology pieces alone as much as possible, and milk the product and customer base as cash cows. That is a great thing from a shareholder’s perspective, since the maintenance streams alone from some of these products will bring home the bacon for another decade at least. If you’re a user or buyer of that particular technology piece though, that sucks.” More

Research In Motion … Research In Motion announced a slew of new and improved offerings:
– The availability of the BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5.0. More
– Mobile Voice System Server for Cisco UC. More
– Improved developer capabilities for integrating other applications with the BlackBerry. More
– A strategic alliance with HP, for printing, BES management, and managed BlackBerry services. More
– Mobile scanning and PDF creation capabilities, through the Cortado Corporate Server. More

TextFlow Update … TextFlow updated its document authoring and sharing service, with better fidelity support for importing Word documents. “The most important new feature is that TextFlow now preserves all formatting, style, background images, headers and footers when importing and then later exporting a Word document. The first Word document imported when starting on a new document defines a style “template” that is applied on subsequent exports back to Word. This means that you will no longer lose your custom Word styles, headers, letterheads, etc. (Please note that embedded images and tables are still not supported in TextFlow.) ” Available immediately. More

Other Items
– Thoughts on concentration and focus, and dealing with interruptions.
– The Action Machine … three simple steps to productivity (apparently).
– Update from Mainsoft, on new customers for integrating SharePoint and Notes.
– Microsoft released Service Pack 2 for SharePoint.
– Four free services that will help you daily, from Jason Womack (ChaCha, ReQall, Google Alerts, and Google Calendar).
– MimoMonitors, for a secondary display of important data. Connects via USB.
– Central Desktop is running a webinar on May 21 about using the Central Desktop service as an intranet.
– Always ask what others do before they ask you the same.