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The XenServer v6 is now based on the Xen 4.1 hypervisor, and Open vSwitch is the default networking stack too. This was the enhancement that included jumbo frames and distributed virtual networking features that was first seen in a patch to v5.6. This, along with some other performance tweaks, will show up as a 70% or more network throughput increase, according to Citrix' own measurements. Speaking of performance improvements, XenServer includes the virtual graphics support for HDX to make virtual desktop implementations faster. It also assigns a physical graphics processor to a particular VM, so apps can leverage the graphics instructions set of the processor specifically. The v6 beta freshens support for several newer Linux versions, and support for 1 TB of host RAM too.

Other improvements are in the self-service and private cloud management areas. Self-Service Manager now includes support for both XenServer as well as VMware vSphere; this enables you to build self-service environments for private clouds. It comes packaged as another virtual appliance. Speaking of virtual appliances, XenServer v6 can create these that span across multiple VMs, preserving the relationship among the VMs. And Citrix has integrated importing VMware's VMDKs and Microsoft VHDs into XenCenter itself and made the import process more reliable as well.

All XenServer v6 hosts and VMs can now be managed with a new version of Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012, which has several enhancements of its own for cloud and VM management. You'll need a separate piece of software to bridge the Xen and Microsoft universes, which should be available from Citrix when the Microsoft 2012 versions are finished later this year.

XenServer v6 beta can be downloaded here (registration required). Citrix will host a live webinar tomorrow at 11 am ET (via GotoMeeting, naturally) to show off some of these new features.

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Answers looks a lot like Quora or SocialText or other Q&A-style social services, see the screenshot below.

The Links service is another URL-shortening service with a few added features, including being able to password-protect the shortened link and also have it automatically expire, appropriate for doing time-sensitive demos for example. It looks like this:

One issue to SocialSpring will be how quickly it can be adopted and deployed across a company. Obviously, the more ubiquitous the apps, the more useful it will be for a workgroup or entire enterprise.

Pricing for the three services is based on per user per month charges of $2 for Stream and Answers, and $1 for Links, with free trial versions available. Installations can either be hosted on Intridea's cloud or behind a corporate firewall, the latter is already being used by some early customers.

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Why bother? Well, price for one thing. The monthly fees at Rollbase start at $30 (with more complex pricing for different services), much less than the fees at Salesforce.com. Control too. You can import your entire CRM or any Force.com app within a few minutes, and all the databases linkages and relationships should be intact. Backup and testing could be another reason: rather than paying for a dev/test environment on Salesforce, you could have a cheaper in-house hosted alternative.

Salesforce isn't the only thing the Rollbase tool can migrate: you can move Microsoft Access database and Excel spreadsheets, a nice way to upgrade them to a more modern environment.

The link above has a five-minute screencast demo that shows what is involved in the migration.

The Rollbase Automated Force.com Migration Tool is available now at no additional cost as part of the Rollbase.com Hosted Cloud service as well as Rollbase Private Cloud, which can be downloaded, installed and deployed on in-house or third party servers.

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Why bother? Well, price for one thing. The monthly fees at Rollbase start at $30 (with more complex pricing for different services), much less than the fees at Salesforce.com. Control too. You can import your entire CRM or any Force.com app within a few minutes, and all the databases linkages and relationships should be intact. Backup and testing could be another reason: rather than paying for a dev/test environment on Salesforce, you could have a cheaper in-house hosted alternative.

Salesforce isn't the only thing the Rollbase tool can migrate: you can move Microsoft Access database and Excel spreadsheets, a nice way to upgrade them to a more modern environment.

The link above has a five-minute screencast demo that shows what is involved in the migration.

The Rollbase Automated Force.com Migration Tool is available now at no additional cost as part of the Rollbase.com Hosted Cloud service as well as Rollbase Private Cloud, which can be downloaded, installed and deployed on in-house or third party servers.

The company claims a collection of 100 nodes can deliver hundreds of thousands of objects per second, with latencies below 40ms at a cost of less than a buck a gigabyte. The idea is to leverage cheaper commodity SATA disk drives but attach them to inexpensive computers to handle the parallel processing. Unlike many SANs, the individual disks can be different brands or technologies, making it easier to updgrade the entire collection.

The system has been installed for several months at a Belgian cable company (video link here) who has upgraded their storage collection several times since their initial use of Ring.

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The company claims a collection of 100 nodes can deliver hundreds of thousands of objects per second, with latencies below 40ms at a cost of less than a buck a gigabyte. The idea is to leverage cheaper commodity SATA disk drives but attach them to inexpensive computers to handle the parallel processing. Unlike many SANs, the individual disks can be different brands or technologies, making it easier to updgrade the entire collection.

The system has been installed for several months at a Belgian cable company (video link here) who has upgraded their storage collection several times since their initial use of Ring.

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Just take a look at what Google is doing to attract new subscribers. It's aggressively pursuing Lotus Notes customers by offering enhancements that include integration with GMail.

That's called aggressive marketing. It is not much different than Facebook going after Google's customer base. It's just a different approach based on Facebook's efforts to turn young consumers to a simple messaging platform that appeals to a demographically different audience.

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg insists Facebook Messages is not an "email killer." But is there any doubt that GMail is in his sights? No.

The Facebook messaging platform includes email but it also has features such as SMS and Chat. Google has those features, too.

Further, The Microsoft Office integration allows people to download documents from within the Facebook Message platform. That alone is a sign of how Facebook is aligning. It's teaming with Microsoft, Google's long time rival.

Google is different. Google Apps is driving for more subscribers by offering enhancements that makes it easier for Lotus Notes customers to switch to Google Apps.

According to the Google Enerprise blog:

• Support for OAuth, so you don't need to store administrator and user passwords to migrate mail, calendar and contacts.
• User provisioning can be run as a separate module prior to user migration, so you can verify users have been provisioned as you like before migrating data.
• Enhanced logging capabilities so you can see what migration actions were taken.
• Support for assigning group owners from migrated Domino Directory groups.
• Improved support for migrated calendar events and push synchronization for BlackBerry® devices.
• Simpler migration tool interface.

Facebook has its own markets to conquer. That means it has to battle with Googe. For Google's part, the battle is now more tactical. It's about adding enhancements to shift the mind of the business user to the Google Apps platform. That means pursuing Lotus Notes.

What this all tells us? Going after your competitor is just part of the game.

In a move that addresses these concerns, Amazon Web Services announced yesterday that it had added support for Bucket Policies. These policies will provide a single mechanism for managing access to the Amazon S3 buckets and for the objects stored in them. These policies are expressed using Amazon's Access Policy Language, which will centralize and refine permissions management.

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The Old Controls

Prior to the announcement, there were two access control mechanisms for Amazon S3: query string authentication and the Access Control List. The former creates a URL that will grant temporary access to a bucket. The latter provides for selective access, with certain permissions - read, write, read ACL, write ACL - designated for certain people. One of the drawbacks to either of these methods was that new objects added to a bucket required their access controls be set individually.

The New Controls

So while these ACLs grant permission on an object-by-object basis, the new bucket policies allow a much more granulate level of control. Permissions can be added or denied across all or a subset of the objects within a single bucket. The policies can include references to IP addresses and ranges, dates, the HTTP referrer, and transports (http and https).

As AWS notes in their explanation of the new bucket policies, this allows you to, for example, allow write access to a particular S3 bucket only from your corporate networ during business hours from your custom application (as identified by a user agent string).

These new bucket policies are designed to facilitate the way in which information is stored and accessed in the cloud, adding to IT's security and management toolkit

Chatter has the goal of bringing the best of the social media tools to the enterprise, making enterprise sales as easy to use as Facebook or Twitter. With all of the buzz around privacy and social networking tools, it's refreshing to hear that these tools use a the same security models that the rest of SalesForce has built in to its platform.

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Adding Collaboration to the SalesForce architecture

Chatter is a new module in the SalesForce architecture that takes advantage of the existing APIs and services, while providing rich collaboration features. "Collaboration as a Service" is now trending as a new category in the industry.

Adds Dialog to Existing Sales Flow

If you're used to using SalesForce today, you'll see new features embedded in your screen with Chatter, including the "What are you working on" box, which mimics the experience of posting status on Facebook or Twitter.

Similar to Twitter, Chatter users can team can add a hashtag to their post and create a new topic to share in the enterprise, inviting others to join them in dialog use the same hash. For those of you not familiar with the #hash, it is used to create a 'topic' that is known by individuals to increase the ability to search posts about the same topic. Learn more about the hash on Wikipedia.

We had questions about these features and whether the #hash would be robust enough to support enterprise sharing. In Twitter today, we see groups overwriting each other and having "hash overload". Will this happen in the enterprise? From our investigation, it seems that SalesForce has this figured out, and is adding more features in this area. We're not sure how yet these dynamic groupings will work alongside more static topics that may exist. This seems to be an area of opportunity for companies to build their own patterns.

Follow People, Documents, and Applications

Chatter supports setting up follower lists and teams and advanced permissions for supporting projects. In addition, a person can follow a document, or a record in a database. For example, a person may want to be apprised of all changes in a sales forecast document and have those changes piped to them in their feed. This feature follows the "like facebook" mantra that we've heard from the SalesForce product team, instead of the user going to the document, the updates are coming to them.

Dominic Shine, from Reed Exhibitions gave us some insight into why his company is a first-mover in the pilot program.

"Many of our employees use Facebook and/or LinkedIn or Twitter so are fairly familiar with the concept but we've never managed to get these to work internally properly. We are very enthusiastic about the concept of having that sort of functionality integrated with our sales and marketing processes and also as a more general purpose tool that will allow general social networking but also the ability to "follow" what is happening in processes or on platforms."

We still have a few questions about how easy this be for users to use the following mechanics correctly.

Will there be social blunders in the enterprise, where your favorite team member doesn't follow you back? Will employees "game" the system and follow everyone? These questions and more are some of the things we look forward to learning more about from customers as they proceed in their production roll out of Chatter.

We asked the SalesForce team about these questions. Kraig Swensrud, SVP Product Marketing shared his perspective on the design goal is for followers in Chatter:

• It is designed to be less about popularity contest and more about the people who you need across company
• The followers will represent the social graph of connections in a company
• Will see custom "groups" of followers as a pattern around projects, sales leads, and business processes.
• Trending topics. What are most followed documents, records, bringing the most valuable enterprise assets up to the top

We have additional questions that aren't yet answered. For example how it works to bridge Facebook and Twitter, and what it means for a Chatter user to "follow" a Twitter person (does the Twitter person know that they are considered a lead). So, to dig in a bit deeper we asked a few of the SalesForce customers their experience in setting up the tools during the first phase of testing, whether they are seeing any surprises. Here's what we heard so far:

Our question: What are your thoughts on how you promote "proper" following in your enterprise. Have you seen users do things that you wouldn't expect? Any social challenges or surprises?

James Sheppard, from Vetrazzo responded:

"Some gravitate to heavier use than others, as would be expected. I'm very pleased that many employees have stopped communicating the old fashioned way of "Broad CC" email and instead are turning to Chatter to both ask questions and share ideas and resources. It's too soon to call them "social patterns" perhaps, but I see real potential to have topic oriented conversations in a way that's far more intuitive and useful than email."

Dominic Shine, added:

"There's some natural interpretation about who to follow at first. But people have talked for years about how work really gets done through informal networks. The surprising thing about Chatter is that it's a simple way to for people to interact through those informal networks without chasing people. If someone is great at vendor negotiations, I follow that person. If someone is a superstar account rep, I follow that person. I can start to pick up and replicate their success through that collaboration. And, with Chatter, everyone can tailor it and its use for their own needs. I think we're starting to see, and will see more of, Chatter helping to "flatten" the organisation so that people at all levels of the organisation can collaborate around an issue, sale, product etc whereas the communication on these items can be hierarchical in organisations and there is frustration sometimes about slow communication or decision making up and down the hierarchy - Chatter can democratize that communication flow."

All in all, this seems like a great move by SalesForce. It is going to likely take some tweaking to get it perfect, but it seems on track to be a hit for SalesForce customers. Customers that we spoke to have been giving feedback on features that can be enhanced to meet their needs. And, to the credit of the SalesForce team, they are taking the time to get feedback and get it right.

The enterprise is becoming more social. Maybe soon you'll be able to tweet your way to a nice bonus, thanks to Salesforce and cloud computing.

Is your enterprise ready for social sharing and the power of Chatter?