Zoho Office for SharePoint … Zoho announced an integration between its Zoho Office suite and SharePoint. “Apart from providing editing capability for existing documents, the add-in also provides collaborative editing functionality. Based on sharing permissions defined in SharePoint, multiple users can collaboratively work on documents/spreadsheets/presentations real-time. This feature basically brings one of the key advantages of an online office suite to SharePoint.” Available immediately. More

Co-working Spaces … Huddle has a collection of photos of great co-working places around the world. “Coworking spaces have been developed by entrepreneurs, consultants, and freelance artists seeking an alternative to working in coffee shops and cafes, or the isolation of independent or home offices. Coworking spaces offer the appeal of a progressive workspace, blended with a casual cafe like feel, while still offering all of the important things you need to run your business. (high-speed internet, phones, conference rooms). Here are ten seriously cool coworking spaces from around the world that offer space for less than $500/month. Stop working in isolation, and start coworking!” More

Lotus Sametime 3D … IBM announced the availability of Virtual Collaboration for Lotus Sametime, or a 3D edition of Sametime. “Using Sametime 3D, people can select colleagues from their Lotus Sametime contact list, and then invite them to participate in a virtual meeting. Participants can meet in a boardroom, an auditorium or a collaboration space. Once they enter the virtual meeting, avatars can use text or voice chat, or both, to communicate. They can then share presentations or other materials, and take notes using virtual flip charts. In the collaboration space, they can share ideas and other information on a brainstorm wall. Participants can then store, update, prioritize and vote on this information. Content can be imported and acted upon both in and out of the virtual meeting space.” More

NewsGator Social Sites 3.0 … NewsGator announced version 3.0 of Social Sites, its social networking add-on for SharePoint, adding Socialpedia (a wikipedia-style internal web site) and Knowledge Explorer. “Expertise maps, which take advantage of the rich media features in Microsoft Silverlight, provide an interactive graphical snapshot of the professionals in an organization that are most informed on a selected topic. When users click on a topic in a tag cloud, the map appears with experts arranged according to their automatically calculated expertise ratings. Need an internal expert to talk to a prospect on dual-flange inverted widgets? Click on the “widgets” tag and find her. Looking for the missing link in the potential miracle drug you’re developing? Discover your overseas counterpart and get it done. The CEO needs a few slides now on New Zealand go-to-market strategy? Find the guy who knows it backwards and forwards.” (kudos team for the NZ reference). More

nGenera Collaborative Enterprise Platform … nGenera releases version 3.0 of its collaboration platform, which come with strategy and implementation services. “The nGenera Collaboration Platform 3.0, a fully-featured cloud-based platform that hosts a suite of collaborative applications, which power nGenera’s CEM Solutions, was also released. nGenera’s CEM solutions begin with thought leadership and innovative research which provides executives with the knowledge and tools to select and drive the right initiatives. Each solution consists of a new set of collaborative applications on a common platform. The collaborative strategy and implementation services provide guidance to maximize the results of every initiative.” More

Socialtext Free 50 … Socialtext released Free 50, a new for-free licensing option for firms and groups with up to 50 people. “Socialtext Free 50 provides online collaboration with Twitter-style micro-blogging, social networking, personalized dashboards, weblog publishing and a wiki workspace. Built on Adobe(R) AIR(TM) technology, the dynamic desktop application includes “drag-n-drop” file sharing across the enterprise. The organization’s IT department can control of the private network’s content and participation in Free 50 at no charge, and the free service is governed by IT friendly policies. Socialtext Free 50 also offers the ability to seamlessly upgrade to Socialtext Hosted and secure Onsite Appliance deployment options for the Socialtext Platform.” Each Free 50 account can only have one workspace. More

Open Text Social Media … Open Text announced Social Media, an enterprise 2.0 product, with dashboards, communities, profiles, blogs and microblogs, wikis and social search. “The solution offers a natural and intuitive social media application that gives people new ways of working productively together through the Web and mobile devices, while also meeting security and compliance demands by being integrated with a company s wider ECM system …. Open Text Social Media also meets the demands of today s increasingly mobile knowledge workers who demand mobile solutions that enable them to access key corporate systems. For social media solutions to be truly successful they need to provide a rich mobile experience. Open Text Social Media provides this with native mobile applications for Apple iPhone and RIM BlackBerry devices initially, with additional device support planned.” Available July 2009. More

Migrating from eRoom to SharePoint … Rich talks about migrating eRoom spaces to SharePoint. “I wanted to talk about some considerations for anyone who is deciding to migrate eRoom over to SharePoint. I’ve been working with eRoom for 10 years now and still think it’s the best and most secure team collaboration tool out there. However, I’m excited about SharePoint these days as the strong Microsoft developer community continues to build cool stuff to really enhance SharePoint and make it sing. Of course SharePoint is really a platform that does a whole lot more than just the “team collaboration” that eRoom focuses on. eRoom is simply the “secure team sites” / collaboration component of the larger SharePoint ecosystem. How you deal with team sites in SharePoint may be dependent on the larger SharePoint logical design. And for those who are migrating to SharePoint, you have to think about 3 things: 1. Logical Design – what does an eRoom community map to in SharePoint? an eRoom facility? an eRoom itself? 2. Scalability – Physically, eRoom packages content into rooms within facility SQL databases, files stored separately. SharePoint’s different and how will it handle all that eRoom content within its content databases? 3. Migration of Data – do you want just files or files with all eRoom content?” More

LotusLive Connections … IBM announced the near-immediate availability of a hosted edition of Lotus Connections, on LotusLive. “LotusLive Connections is the newest addition to the LotusLive Software-as-a-Service application suite that IBM debuted at its Lotusphere conference in January. That line already includes LotusLive Engage, a collection of online services including Web conferencing, Notes messaging, online file sharing and storage, contact management and activity management … Like the on-premise version of the software, LotusLive Connections helps individuals, departments and even companies collaborate on projects, share materials and identify people who are subject experts — either within a firewall or outside. LotusLive Connections will be available June 30, priced starting below $10 per user, per month, according to IBM.” More

Other Items
– Jive and SAP integrated a couple of products to enable social business intelligence.
– Toshiba released its unified communications suite.
– Xiant is a new startup focused on better management of email in Outlook.