Hosted collaboration

Microsoft last month launched US availability of its Online Services (Microsoft-hosted email and collaboration software, available on subscription). I snuck into a blogger roundtable held at the event and felt privileged to witness the spectacle of a team of Microsoftees celebrating the benefits of moving applications to the cloud. Of course they maintained the official mantra that customers have the choice whether to stay on-premise or go to the cloud. But hearing how delighted customers are to bypass the horrors of on-premise implementation and the upfront costs of conventional licensing, I wondered aloud how many are ever likely to choose to go back on-premise once they’ve experienced a cloud deployment.

37 Signals Backpack tool, which creates an intranet for companies, has announced a couple of upcoming features in the past few days that are meant to overall improve the service. Multi-user support is one of the features that will soon be a part of the Backpack system, and to that end, there will also be a Newsroom. The new feature is meant to offer a feature for users to be alerted to activities that have taken place since you last checked in. It is, in effect, a Twitter-like updating, status system that brings in the bulletin-board/announcement necessity of a tool that facilitates communication amongst groups of people working around a similar goal. ***

Salesforce.com, best known for its hosted sales applications, is pushing into Web content management. The company on Tuesday expects to detail new products and the acquisition of start-up Koral, which created a Web content management service tied to Salesforce.com. Terms of the purchase of Koral, a small company based in San Mateo, Calif., which first launched its product last fall, were not disclosed. Later this year, Salesforce.com will release two products designed to help people manage so-called unstructured data such as Microsoft Office documents and multimedia files. ***

Siebel Systems, the customer relationship management software giant, has introduced the latest update to its online hosted software, adding new tools for workplace collaboration and product marketing. Wednesday's launch of the hosted software, dubbed Siebel CRM OnDemand Release 8, marks the fifth revision of the online tools that the company has released in the past 12 months. The software maker has been increasingly focused on the market for hosted CRM as rival Salesforce.com continues to grow at a rapid pace, while Siebel has struggled to meet earnings and sales expectations. ***