For years now, companies have been vying for attention on social streams controlled by the likes of Facebook and Twitter. Hundreds of millions of people flocked to those streams, and corporations figured they had to follow. But now businesses are realizing something has been lost in the transition, that there’s nothing like being able to control exactly how they speak to customers, and the humble website seems to be surging back.

NewsGator has upgraded its Social Sites enterprise social networking (ESN) add-on for SharePoint to make the software better able to tailor the content, notifications and capabilities it displays for each user. The overall goal is to make it easier for Social Sites users to stay engaged with work tasks, information and colleagues.

Jive Software is making a mobile push with new and enhanced mobile applications that have an emphasis on helping users of the enterprise social networking (ESN) suite create, not just view, content from their tablets and smartphones. Responding to a significant increase in mobile usage of its product, Jive has developed its first native iPad application, enhanced its existing iPhone application and upgraded its iOS software development kit.

Lenovo offered a peek under the covers on a new consumer cloud storage service called Lenovo Reach, which it said will allow users to securely access their cloud-based files and applications from any device via a single login ID.

Expected to go live later this year, Lenovo Reach will offer 5GB of free capacity.

Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise a attiré l’attention des clients sur la convergence des réseaux télécoms associée à l’essor des services cloud. Ou comment façonner cette transformation dans un univers multi-partites, multi-médias et multi-devices…

Avaya has concluded its annual International Avaya User's Group (IAUG) event, and one of the most noteworthy announcements was the company's strategic vision to transform its approach to collaboration. The company's strategy calls to accelerate development and integration of next-generation unified communications and contact center applications.

Zoho is getting into the business social-networking game with a new product called Pulse, which also ties back to many of its other applications.

Pulse features the now-familiar mix of activity streams, private messaging, notifications, blogs, groups and people search functionality familiar to anyone who's been within striking distance of both consumer social networks like Facebook and the many offerings for business, such as Yammer and Jive.

Jive Software has released an add-on to its ESN (enterprise social networking) software that automates and simplifies the process of integrating Jive's suite with third-party systems.

The add-on is based on technology Jive acquired when it bought a company called StreamOnce. At launch, the StreamOnce add-on links Jive's ESN suite with the Gmail and Microsoft Exchange email servers and with the DropBox cloud storage app.

Citrix has added instant messaging to its Podio enterprise collaboration product so that employees can engage in one-to-one and group text chats while they work on tasks and projects.

This summer, Citrix will extend Podio Chat with audio communications and video conferencing, expanding the real-time communications features of the product.

"Now you can chat within Podio in the context of your work," said Bernardo de Albergaria, vice president and general manager of SaaS products and markets at Citrix.

Jive Software has upgraded its enterprise social collaboration product to make it easier to tailor group sites for specific business tasks and flag member comments to trigger specific actions.

Jive is also delivering deep integration between its software and the Box cloud storage and file sharing service, as well as tighter links with Salesforce.com's CRM suite and Chatter enterprise social networking component.