Back in July, a new cloud computing and productivity platform called CX.com raised $5 million from Eric Schmidt’s Tomorrow Ventures and Hanna Capital, bringing the startup’s total funding to $10 million. This is pretty impressive considering the company largely has been flying under the radar since its launch earlier this year.

But CX is now officially ready to share the official news of their production release, a platform that enables users to backup, synchronize, share, and manage their data in the cloud — from any device to any device.

This includes the ability to sync new, changed, offline or deleted files to all connected computers, maintaining a history for all of your devices as you make changes. What’s more, users can take advantage of realtime backup, synchronized file sharing among groups, across multiple platforms, including desktops, laptops, netbooks, and mobile devices.

CX’s CEO Brad Robertson tells us that, through offering a 10 GB account for free, the company isn’t just trying to launch a lame marketing tactic to entice users, the company wants to make a bolder statement about the industry: That storage and sharing companies don’t have to set a low limit in which users will quickly hit their quote and be forced to pay.

So, CX is giving away 10 GB for free and is only deducting storage space from the group creator, not every single user that the person shares with, nor does it include the size of their unlimited file revisions from their users’ quota. Free services are available for up to three groups, and users receive 10 GB of free storage. For $10 a month, customers can create 10 groups with unlimited group size and take advantage of realtime notifications, with 50 GB of storage. At $20 a month, groups are unlimited, and storage is at 100 GBs.

By being transparents about how much they charge and by offering a realtime collaboration and social graph infrastructure, CX aims to become more than a storage commodity, but a platform that enables users to discover, search, and find their content in realtime.

The new production release also offers all customers groups, even free users, with the capability to add up to 1 million members per group. The company also has a realtime notifications suite and collaboration feature set in limited beta that looks to be launched by the end of the year.

Along with its production release, CX is also announcing that it has added Keith Pardy to its management team. Pardy was the former CMO at RIM, and has previously worked at Coke as well as Nokia. Will Pardy, Chief Product Designer and architect.

CX’s new platform is available with apps for the Web, Mac, PC, iPad, and iPhone, with Android and BlackBerry releases coming before the holidays.

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Cisco this morning announced that it has acquired San Francisco startup Versly, a privately-held company that develops collaboration tools that integrate with Microsoft Office applications.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but all Versly employees will be integrated into Cisco’s Collaboration Software Group (CSG) upon the close of the acquisition.

Versly builds plug-ins that enable groups of people to collaborate around content in Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and emails.

From the looks of it, the service was still in private beta, so this is a quick exit for Versly.

Here’s how Murali Sitaram, VP and general manager, CSG, Cisco, pitches the acquisition:

“Collaboration is a top priority at Cisco. With this acquisition we’re enhancing our collaboration offerings and improving the user experience by integrating social technologies within the business applications individuals and teams use at work.”

Versly’s software will be integrated into offerings such as Cisco Quad, Jabber and WebEx.

According to its CrunchBase profile, Versly was backed by seed funding raised from Accel Partners, Baseline Ventures, 500 Startups and a couple of angel investors, including Scott Dietzen, Kenny Van Zant, Jonathan Katzman and Rasool Rayani.

The company was started by former BEA and Sun exec Benjamin Renaud and former Yahoo-er Erik Eccles. The rest of the team is detailed here.

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The new version of social collaboration software Confluence includes improved notifications, a faster way to share pages and blog post, a new Space Directory and Drag and Drop support for attaching and embedding files and documents.

JIRA, Atlassian’s bug and project management tool, includes improved search and usability and new admin and reporting features. And Atlassian has improved the integration between Jira and Confluence, allows using to develop content from a free-form description in Confluence, then turn it into an actionable task in Jira within the same interface.

In addition, a new ‘Insert JIRA Issues’ dialog in the Confluence editor lets users insert ‘recently viewed’ JIRA issues, create new issues, or search for existing issues using ‘Quick Search’ or JIRA Query Language (JQL).

Atlassian is on a roll, and recently raised $60 million in funding, and acquired Bitbucket.org, a hosted service for code collaboration.

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Citrix Online, a division of Citrix Systems, this morning announced that it is to acquire Netviewer, a privately-held SaaS vendor in collaboration and IT services based in Germany. Netviewer will become an integral part of Citrix’ online services division, but the terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

The transaction is expected to close in early 2011, subject to the satisfaction of closing conditions.

With the acquisition of the web conferencing and other collaboration software maker, Citrix Online aims to further its global expansion. Netviewer says it has more than 18,000 customers customers in countries throughout Europe, including the UK, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Benelux, the Nordics, Italy and Spain.

Upon the closing of the acquisition, Netviewer CFO Robert Gratzl will be appointed as the VP and General Manager for Citrix Online in EMEA.

Founded in Karlsruhe, Germany, in 2001, the company currently employs more than 220 people according to its about page. The company has raised $24 million in venture funding in total.

Its investor roster includes T-Online Venture and the European Founders Fund (the investment vehicle of the Facebook-backing Samwer brothers).

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The Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution gives customers the ability to deploy multiple collaboration applications on one server in a virtualized environment and then host those applications for multiple client organizations.

It’s basically a cloud in a box, or rather a bunch of cloud apps in a box. Partners can purchase the solution from Cisco and then license the use of the collaboration applications to a number of customers via a subscription-based service. These partners can also use Cisco’s technologies to build applications on the hosted platform.

In other Cisco news, the company just announced a branded HD tablet running Android with full video conferencing and email and media access designed for business users. And Cisco also bought networking company Core Optics for $99 million.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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Socialwok, a product that ads a social layer to Gmail and other Google products, is spreading its wings beyond the search giant to Microsoft land. Today, the startup, which launched its Google Apps-focused product at TechCrunch50 last year, is rolling out the Socialwok Social Connector for Microsoft Office Outlook 2010, 2007, 2003.

Similar to the layer that Socialwok creates for Google Apps and Gmail, the connector allows Outlook users to create a private social network within the application to share ideas, emails, files, Office documents from Microsoft Word, Google Docs and other rich media using status updates.

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Central Desktop, a Sharepoint-like SaaS collaboration platform for the enterprise, is launching a new tool that allows for cloud-enabled document collaboration for Microsoft Office users. Central Desktop’s tool allows users to simultaneously co-author Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents in real time, as well as open and save files directly into the cloud.

Central Desktop for Office leverages technology from OffiSync and is compatible with any version of Microsoft Office including 2003, 2007 and 2010. Once installed, Central Desktop for Office adds a new toolbar in Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint that enables users to open, save, edit and co-author files stored in the cloud – directly from within Office. The new tool allows users to comment on files, manage subscribers and track version history. Central Desktop’s co-authoring feature enables more than one user to edit Office files, simultaneously, by conveniently tracking and syncing all changes made by collaborators and merging them correctly into one updated version.

Of course, Microsoft Office includes similar multi-author, collaborative features in its new web-based version of Office. But Central Desktop says that their tool brings document collaboration to older versions of Office at a much lower cost than upgrading to the new version of Office.

There are other tools besides Central Desktop that offer similar capabilities, such as DocVerse, which was recently acquired by Google.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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Socialwok, a product that ads a social layer to Gmail and other Google products, was just integrated as a partner in Google’s recently launched Google Apps Marketplace. At last year’s TechCrunch50 conference, Socialwok made a big splash, winning the award for best demopit startup and launching its enterprise-friendly, FriendFeed-like layer for Google Apps. The web-based application was praised for launching a social network that wrapped around the very unsocial Google Apps. And the startup just launched a gadget to allow users access all the features of Socialwok without leaving Gmail. Today, Socialwok is becoming more than just a collaboration platform; the startup is integrating with Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, and RSS feeds to allow users to tap into their outside social networks within Socialwok.

Socialwok is now a full-fledged Twitter client and allows users to Tweet directly from its platform, as well as track a brand or keywords on Twitter from within the application. Additionally, users can monitor and track updates on a Facebook page. Socialwok is also allowing users to import RSS feeds and share it within a company’s Socialwok account. And Socialwok is integrated with Google Buzz, and allows users to tap into their Buzz streams from within the platform and share content in Buzz from within Socialwok.

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This is a big move for the company. On a conference call this morning, Yammer CEO David Sacks said that one of the problems with Yammer so far has been that communication on the service has been restricted to internal use within a company. The issue many people ran into was that they’d want to collaborate with their clients or business partners as well, but didn’t have a way to do that without inviting them to their company’s internal network (which often wasn’t an option).

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These changes are affecting how IT responds to and supports the business. Building a strategic business productivity infrastructure which can allow for better collaboration, faster access to relevant information and drives key business insights is what sets apart the IT organization that is merely reacting and putting out fires, from one that is implementing technology to drive productivity and business value. However, how do you do that without compromising on security and manageability?

Join Damir and I as we travel to 8 cities across Canada to talk about how you can enable collaboration, unified communication, content management, enterprise search and business intelligence in your organization while keeping your corporate digital assets secure and managed using Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010. You’ll also have the opportunity to talk to local partners who have already been building solutions on top of this new platform.

This free morning event is filling up fast, so register now!

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