We just released an update to our Enterprise Collaboration and Social Software Report which evaluates nineteen Enterprise 2.0 vendors. Version 4.1 includes updated reviews of three software suites (Jive, Socialtext, blueKiwi) and two specialists (MindTouch, Mediawiki).

Here’s a quick snapshot of what you’ll find in this update:

Jive software announced its 2011 financial results this week. Although our 360-degree vendor evaluations dwell at length on the products and real-world customer experiences, we also keep an eye on vendor financials to understand their stability and viability, and raise red flags if required

Jive Software has long been the darling of the Enterprise Collaboration & Social Software space. Yes, they have decent (though not spectacular) technology, but the company has always been savvier about "message." Jive talked social networking as an alternative to SharePoint 2007 when that was hot, then pivoted to more of a collaboration message as customers got more serious, then joined the cloud/API/ecosystem bandwagons at the right time, and so on

Social software vendor Jive Software recently announced a new module called Fathom for Social Media Monitoring. Fathom comes as a free add-on to an existing Jive 5 setup. It provides basic capabilities for monitoring content across Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, blogs and other sources. Fathom Pro, a paid upgrade to the free version, adds some advanced analytics and intelligence capabilities to the free module

SharePoint licensees seeking to deliver on the promise of social networking and more advanced collaboration applications must choose among three alternative approaches to close the gap

The initially meteoric rise of Second Life gave visibility to a (mostly) new crop of vendors looking to apply "immersive" or "virtual" experiences to enterprise collaboration

You may be getting pressure to join a particular tool's bandwagon. This year it could be Drupal, Sitecore, Jive, or Liferay. Next year it will certainly be a different set of names. Our industry is nothing if not faddish. When faced with the bandwagon effect, I encourage you to pause and consider all the angles

We've just updated several vendor evaluations in our Enterprise Collaboration and Social Software technology stream, including

What, your system vendor doesn't have an app store yet? Apple has popularized the concept, and most phone platforms now have something similar: Google's Android Market and Nokia's Ovi Store come to mind. So now everyone has to have one, not just devices, but enterprise software as well

I participated in an interesting workshop at the 2.0 Council last week where one of the big debates was -- inevitably -- the tension between behemoth collaboration platforms (especially SharePoint) vs. point solutions for social computing

This is just a little tiff between vendors, so why should you care? Well, both are making it abundantly clear that a vendor is not a neutral source of information

Google bought DocVerse two weeks ago -- but that was hardly a surprise. DocVerse allows people to collaborate on the same Office document via special plug-in. The software syncs

This week we updated our collaboration and social computing vendor evaluations. Specifically, we updated the following reviews

How can we best understand the broad social software and collaboration vendor marketplace? I'd just been pondering that question when

At CMS Watch we evaluate an awful lot of products, and making sense of all this research can be a challenge.