There’s a lot of speculation on various blogs about Google’s acquisition of DocVerse, a startup founded by former Microsoft employees to enable co-authoring of MS Office documents. Most of the discussion has focused on the potential of Google integrating DocVerse into its apps portfolio, but given the chasm in terms of feature/functionality between Google Apps and Microsoft Office, it doesn’t seem that the idea of a MS Office and Google App user co-authoring a document is going to be feasible anytime soon.

Instead, is it possible that Google aims to position DocVerse as a hosted alternative to SharePoint for workgroup collaboratation, delivering a Wave-like functionality that integrates with Microsoft Office as a separate service from its Apps? The universe of Microsoft Office users is a massive order of magnitude larger than those using Google Apps, or who will use Google Apps in the next few years, so why not challenge Microsoft’s two big growth engines - SharePoint, and the forthcoming Office Live Workspace to provide a real-time collaboration capability compatible with Microsoft’s desktop suite?

Salesforce.com’s Chatter social computing service is now available to a limited number of private beta participants. Salesforce.com’s first shot across the social computing bow was fired back in November when they announced the service, now that the wraps are coming off we’ll see if Salesforce can compete against the likes of Microsoft, IBM, a plethora of emerging vendors, and even Cisco.

I think Chatter has the potential to be extremely disruptive. Salesforce brings some inherent strengths to the table, it’s arguably the most widely deployed software as a service, via the SaaS delivery model Salesforce can bundle Chatter with the services it’s already providing to end-user customers, in effect going around IT and undercutting more centralized attempts to bring social computing to the enterprise via stand-alone platforms such as Confluence, Jive, and SocialText, or as add-ons to collaboration tools such as SharePoint or the Notes/Domino/Quickr suite. Salesforce also points to the opportunity for its development partners to integrate Chatter into the tens of thousands of Force.Com developers, but to succeed Chatter must evolve beyond a Salesforce-based application and offer the opportunity to integrate into other collaboration applications. It must also overcome concerns related to compliance and security of storing potentially discoverable conversations in the cloud.

Google today announced “Buzz“, their attempt to merge the worlds of social computing with e-mail. Buzz adds social tracking features to your in-box, allowing you to see the social activity of your contacts. So what’s not to like?

I think the biggest issue with Buzz is its reliance on Gmail. Google makes the assumption that your e-mail contacts are your buddies, but that’s not necessarily the case. I’ve got a lot of folks in my in-box who are business or casual acquaintances, or whom are on mailing lists that I’m on, and who aren’t friends I’d want to follow. The people I want to follow are all in my Facebook account, but Google doesn’t yet connect to Facebook. If there’s a “killer app” that will move people from Facebook to Google, I don’t see it.   Buzz may have some use as another social computing channel, but at this point I don’t see it replacing Facebook (or even LinkedIn).

Where Buzz, I think, has the greatest appeal is in creating a social community within companies using Gmail or Google apps as their corporate messaging environment. Buzz just fired a shot across the bow of all the social computing software or service vendors targeting SMBs. If you are already paying for a corporate Gmail service, you just got a whole suite of social tools as well.

There is one other problem, it doesn’t work. At this point I don’t see the “Buzz” link in my Gmail in-box, and from following various twitter comments, neither do many others.

Update: Buzz has a massive privacy flaw

What happens when an investor “friends” his broker or agent and they use Facebook chat or e-mail to discuss account activities? This sort of scenario sends shivers through the spine of those responsible for compliance in the financial services sector. We’ve seen a huge market develop around compliance enforcement for e-mail and IM, now those same concerns are extending into the social space.

FINRA, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, issued new guidelines this week designed to help financial firms balance the need to enter the social world with the need to meet electronic records retention rules. The problem for enforcement managers so far has been the lack of tools. While companies such as Facetime Communications have introduced social site enforcement gateways, it remains difficult to cover all the bases as social sites rapidly grow. Ultimately the heart of any successful compliance strategy is user training and a solid acceptable use policy for those accessing social sites. Financial firms would be wise to carefully read FINRA’s recommendations and proactively take measure to limit their risk.

At this week’s Lotusphere IBM introduced “Project Vulcan“, it’s road-map for integrating public and private collaboration and social communities into an extensible set of user interfaces. Ed Brill notes that Vulcan “is the blueprint for where Lotus Notes is going.” Vulcan continues a trend by IBM to merge Notes into public social networks, highlighted by last year’s announcement of LinkedIn integration with Notes.

IBM’s announcement, coupled with Cisco’s recent introduction of public social hooks into its Enterprise Collaboration Platform demonstrate a continued convergence of public and private social networks. These moves highlight the reality that social network such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook are increasingly used for legitimate business purposes rather than for entertainment or catching up with friends and family, but they also raise alarms for those responsible for governance, compliance, and security. I expect that over the next year we’ll see a continued battle between those responsible for information protection and those looking to improve collaboration. Vendors can help their odds of success by addressing compliance concerns up front.

IBM made a big splash today in advance of next week’s Lotusphere conference by announcing that Panasonic is abandoning its Exchange-based e-mail infrastructure for IBM’s LotusLive hosted e-mail offering. This news, coupled with recent wins by Google for its Apps and Gmail offerings may finally demonstrate that cloud-based collaboration services are starting to gain traction within the enterprise. It’s important to note in the IBM Lotus announcement that while iNotes is the initial hook, Lotus expects iNotes adoption to lead to deployment of cloud-based collaboration and social applications including Connections and Quickr as well as project management.

We’re starting to get a lot of questions from our enterprise clients about SaaS-based collaboration offerings. Key factors driving interest include potential for cost reduction, simplified infrastructure, and the ability to easily deploy a robust and reliable set of services across the globe. Key concerns limiting interest include the lack of customization, concern that customers will get a “lowest common denominator service” and concerns related to guaranteeing performance of Internet-based applications. I expect to spend a lot of time in 2010 following the rise of cloud-based collaboration.

“Video” was king at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas as Skype and Cisco brought out new products designed to make it easier for folks to participate in high-quality video conferences from the comfort of their living room. But does video conferencing, which requires full attention, fit with the trends we’re seeing in social applications toward continuous partial communications using a variety of channels, with a variety of participants engaging in multiple simultaneous conversations? Joel Stein at TIME has an interesting take, arguing that people would rather TiVo their lives and shift between various channels and conversations than commit to a video conference. Yes, video conferencing is becoming indispensable in business communications, but will it become an integral part of social communications?

Bill Pray blogged today on the Supreme Court’s decision to take on a case involving the privacy rights of an employee’s use of a government-provided mobile device for personal text messaging. This case further highlights the growing concerns around privacy and compliance as companies embrace emerging communications applications. In almost every conversation I’ve had with end-user organizations the topic of compliance is front and center as they evaluate tools such as SMS, Instant Messaging, Microblogging, and social computing platforms. Our recent SRO session at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston explored many of these issues as well. Bottom line is that its wise to involve your governance and compliance officers early on in as you develop your enterprise 2.0 strategy.

At last week’s Collaboration Summit Cisco introduced WebEx Mail, a hosted service built upon its PostPath acquisition. WebEx Mail represents Cisco’s first foray into a market dominated by Microsoft and IBM, with emerging hosted challengers including Google, Zoho (as well as Microsoft and IBM’s own hosted offerings) and Zimbra’s on-premise server. Like other hosted offerings, Cisco bundles security services such as spam and virus filtering into its service. WebEx Mail offers an intriguing option for current Microsoft Exchange shops, but also has some limitations that prospective buyers ought to be aware as they conduct their evaluation.

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Just a few short years ago it looked as though XMPP, the XML-based messaging protocol central to the Jabber IM platform, was fading away. Microsoft had committed to the SIP-derived SIMPLE (SIP Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions) for its Live Communications Server IM platform, while iBM Lotus incorporated SIMPLE as the basis for Sametime. The momentum behind unified communications around 2006 appeared to leave XMPP in the dust, as vendors rapidly looked to SIP and SIMPLE as the basis for integration of presence with rich-media applications such as voice and video. But then a funny thing happened….

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