Microsoft and BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM) are teaming up today on the public release of BlackBerry Business Cloud Services for Microsoft Office 365, a name which surely Microsoft itself had a hand in creating. The new service will allow corporate customers to manage their deployed BlackBerry devices using Exchange Online, the hosted version of Microsoft’s messaging platform.

The addition comes at no extra cost to current subscribers of the Office 365 suite or the standalone Exchange Online offering, and supports any BlackBerry devices, whether on a business or consumer data plan.

Once enabled, the managed BlackBerry smartphones will be able to sync with Microsoft Exchange Online email, calendar and organizer data. BlackBerry Balance, a new technology that helps admins manage the corporate data on the device, while leaving personal data untouched, will also be available with this new offering. I.T. will be able to manage the phones using a web-based console, but employees will have access to self-service tools for password and device resets, remote lock and remote wipe functions.

BlackBerry Business Cloud Services is live now in 50 countries. More info is here.

Partnerships like this are one of the reasons why some mobile industry insiders believe that RIM could be a viable acquisition target for Microsoft. The companies are already working so closely together to integrate their technologies, and both share a similar end user customer base: the enterprise market. Reports that RIM has even engaged in takeover talks with Microsoft emerged in December, but nothing has yet to come of that. Instead, the company’s recent moves like the co-CEO step-down and (misguided) statements from new CEO Thorsten Heins (“I don’t think any drastic change is needed”) imply that company is attempting a turnaround, not putting itself on the auction block. At least for now.

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Group task manager startup Asana launched its first native mobile app last week. It’s mostly a straight port of its existing mobile web app, so the main benefit at present is that switching back and forth with other apps is much faster than dealing with Safari.

The company says it’s planning to invest in native apps more over time, but the version available is already useful for me since I’ve been dumping all of my story ideas into Asana since I started at TechCrunch in November… because I’m on my phone all the time, and checking Asana to see what I need to do next while I’m also trying to do three or four other things.

If you’re not familiar, the stand-out feature of Asana’s mobile experience is that the projects, task lists and individual task windows from the web app now appear as layers within the home screen.

The left-hand projects bar forms the bottom layer. If you press on one of your projects, its task items slides in from the right to appear as the next layer. If you touch any task, its pane then comes in to form the third layer.

To navigate back from lists or individual items, click on mostly submerged window on the left. The overall feeling is so natural that after a few days of using it I had to stop myself from pressing on my computer monitor to simulate the same experience.

The main downside to the mobile experience, at least for now, is that you can’t create or reassign tasks to others. Instead, any task you create just defaults to yourself and you’ll need to change it on the web site later. Expect everything to improve rather quickly, though. The company iterates fast, recently adding a repeat-event feature to tasks that others and myself had been wanting, for example. (Although it still hasn’t added time of day, which would be helpful for those of us who need to manage a lot of tight deadlines).

Overall, yes, there are dozens and dozens of other task manager type apps out there, and I know because I’ve tried using many of them over the years. Asana is approaching this consumery-enterprise space the right way, by not trying to add in too many features or forcibly define how people can to use it. I’m including Basecamp in the “other” category, as I’ve always found it to be overwrought (or as designer Damian Madray put it, ”Basecamp is to Asana as Android is to iPhone”). Instead, Asana focuses on nailing a few features right then adds on the right extras on top, as my friend Dan Kaplan explored in this recent article. It also does what many competitors don’t, which is provide a seamless user experience across web and (supported) mobile devices.

You can download the iPhone app here.

[Screenshots via Asana, because I don't want to show everyone what I'm working on next]

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UserVoice, makers of tools for managing customer support and feedback, is today launching a new reporting tool for businesses using its “Instant Answers” service. The service, which is built into the UserVoice Full Service system, allows companies to automatically connect their help requests to available Knowledge Base entries in order to provide an immediate answer to incoming queries.

With today’s launch of the reporting tool, those companies will now be able to tell how effective their Knowledge Base is at providing those answers to their customers.

According to UserVoice, sending customer inquiries to a Knowledge Base (KB) can save on average $4 and 7 minutes of support time for each help desk ticket the KB entry can help resolve. It makes the company’s support processes more efficient, too, since many customers tend to ask the same questions over and over again, but rarely check out the company’s KB on their own, says company CEO Richard White.

The newly launched reporting mechanism will now provide companies with more insight into what’s working and what’s not, in terms of the KB redirections. Included in the tool are metrics for the percentage of Knowledge Base entries that are viewed and have successfully averted a support ticket submission, what Knowledge Base articles are viewed most often and what percentage of support requests actually have matching Knowledge Base articles.

UserVoice says its Full Service system is now seeing over 30% growth month-over-month in account sign-ups since its launch in March of this year. Pricing plans for the system start at $5 per month for systems with one agent and go up to fully customizable solutions at $125/month per agent.

The San Francisco-based company was founded in 2008 and has received $800,000 in seed and Series A funding.

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Atlassian, the enterprise software company, has really hit its stride over the last few years. Founded in 2002 in Sydney, the company has today built a solid base of 26,000 customers, which include some big names like Facebook, Zynga, Cisco, and Adobe. In July of last year, the startup raised $60 million from Accel to scale and ramp up M&A. Since then, the company has bought Bitbucket and SourceTree to allow developers to host their source code in Bitbucket (or any other hosting platform) and then manage that source using SourceTree.

Since the beginning, Atlassian’s goal has been to create software development and collaboration tools that enable enterprise teams to quickly and easily plan, build, and launch products. The startup’s flagship software products, like JIRA and Confluence, let software development teams take advantage of issue and project tracking in an effort to improve speed of development and code quality as well as giving those teams a single place collaborate, share, and discuss files, minutes, specs, mockups, diagrams, etc.

According to Atlassian President Jay Simons, the company is currently seeing 40 percent year-over-year growth and $88 million in revenues (up from $56 million last year). Building on this growth, the company is today announcing a series of upgrades and updates that should be a boon to customers worldwide. For starters, the company has moved into new office space at 7th and Harrison in San Francisco, and it is also launching a complete redesign of its website, which goes live this afternoon.

But beyond this, the company is today launching a new SaaS offering called “Atlassian OnDemand”, which will allow software development teams to use the company’s products (including JIRA and Confluence) at a lower, discounted rate. Starting at $10 per month for 10 users, the multi-tenant, cloud-based SaaS essentially allows users of its software to take advantage of its development and collaboration products with the benefit of easy configuration.

Taking over for Atlassian Hosted (which the company has been running since 2006), OnDemand will enable customers to integrate third-party applications to beef up power, features, and versatility in their project environments.

But the real highlight of OnDemand is that it that it’s a la carte, meaning that users can start with as much or as little in the way of services as they need, adding products as they go. Atlassian’s apps are integrated into current holdings, so that, as a user adds new products, tabs appear at the top of their screen. Links can also be shared between apps, as well as shared navigation, and sharing between systems. OnDemand includes JIRA, Confluence, GreenHopper, Team Calendars, Bonfire, FishEye, Crucible, and Bamboo, as well as free maintenance and upgrades of all apps, and third-party compatibility with Google Apps, Zendesk, Salesforce, uTest, and more.

So, with mix-and-match OnDemand offerings, customers can pick and choose the number of users they want per application, starting at $10/month and scaling from there. You can check out the tiered pricing here. It’s pretty cool that now, for Atlassian customers, regardless of what he or she purchases, they’ll be able to take advantage of studio-style integration, single sign-on, consolidated user management, linking, common nav, etc.

More on the new Atlassian here.

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Enterprise I.T. company GroupLogic is today unveiling the latest update to its mobilEcho Mobile File Management (MFM) service with the launch of mobilEcho 3.0. Most importantly, the new version now adds support for the iPhone, in addition to the previously supported iPad. And the company says it will have support for Android by next quarter.

MobilEcho launched in May, allowing companies to provide their employees with secure access to files stored on servers by way of the iPad. Since then, the company has added around 100 businesses who have signed up to use mobilEcho within their organization. GroupLogic, a company which has historically focused on tools that allow enterprise to integrate Apple Macs into their network, says it has added 1,000 customers this year, for a total of 6,000.

In addition to the new iPhone support, the new version of mobilEcho 3.0 also provides the following upgrades and features:

- Complete PDF preview and annotation providing users a secure method to review, comment, and annotate documents to meet corporate security, compliance and governance standards.

- Direct access to the employee’s unique Active Directory assigned home directory.

- Support for automatic one-way sync from the server to the employee device, for easy access to the latest document changes when offline.

- Centrally managed simplified device enrollment.

- Enhanced management features that include per-device status tracking, remote wipe and password reset.

The company also recently partnered with mobile device management (MDM) vendors MobileIron and Good Technology, allowing those customers to deploy mobilEcho within either the MobileIron or Good environment.

According to GroupLogic, the update for mobilEcho will be free for current customers. For new customers, pricing info is available here.

GroupLogic is already a profitable company, so its current development efforts involving mobilEcho are self-funded. The company is not looking for external capital at this time.

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Ken Goldberg, a professor of New Media, Robotics, and Industrial Engineering at UC Berkeley, launched an interesting new startup from the stage of The Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco today, called Hybrid Wisdom Labs.

The startup, according to its founder, has emerged from “more than a decade of robotics and social media research at UC Berkeley”, resulting in today’s launch of its patented “Collaborative Discovery Engine”, a scalable way for companies to rapidly generate realtime insight from their customers and employees. To date, the technology has been used by General Motors, Unilever, Humana, and the US State Department, Goldberg said.

The idea for this new collaborative engine stems from the fact that most tools companies are using to gain intelligence from social media end up being list-based discussion interfaces that don’t scale well and quickly grow to unmanageable proportions, the founder said.

To combat this problem, the discovery engine combines thousands of ideas from brainstorming, social media, and robotics, runs them through a variety of analytic algorithms, before presenting them in a dynamic visualization format that allows companies to easily discover which ideas are important — and what they should be focusing their resources on.

The value proposition: Scale and speed. According to Goldberg, the engine can scale to support thousands of users without sacrificing the speed required to quickly find the best solutions to a company’s problems.

As one can see from the image above, each visualization is focused on a key topic, or question that a company has about its product or strategy, for example. Circles, or really, “blooms”, emerge in the visual rendering (i.e. graphical map), which represent a new idea or response proposed by participants. The positions of the blooms in relation to each other are based on the relevance of the opinion (or idea) to like-minded ones, and the color and size of the bloom represents the number of “likes” or positive responses the idea is generating.

Using sliders that represent two dimensions (how much they agree with AND how insightful they find the response), users then evaluate the responses, presumably resulting in a more robust analysis than the simple “thumbs-up” or “thumbs-down” pervasive to social media’s evaluation of preference.

As the reputation algorithm processes further responses, the least important ideas fade into the background, and the more popular (or commonly occurring) ones take visual precedence, leading to a deeper look into collective customer intelligence.

As to how beta testers have responded? According to a company statement, released via its website: “In January 2010, Hybrid Wisdom partnered with a leading Fortune 50 manufacturer to find insightful solutions into how they could improve their brand and reputation. The Collaborative Discovery Engine engaged 1,200 of their most valued customers. After a few weeks, the most valuable insights were reported back to the company, including users’ desires around extending warranties to convey confidence in quality and stability. Both the company and the participants were extremely pleased. In a follow up survey, 95% of users indicated that they would be “Extremely Likely” to participate again”.

For more, check out the company at home here. Let us know what you think.

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British entrepreneur Alastair Mills, who recently sold his latest venture, SpiriTel, to communications giant Daisy for £37 million, is at it again.

Mills is today debuting his new company, Six Degrees Group, and has announced that private equity firm Penta Capital (who also backed SpiritTel) has agreed to invest £60 million (roughly $94 million) in the business. Six Degrees Group is launching today with almost 100 staff and already serving over 1,200 business customers.

Read the rest of the story on TechCrunch Europe.

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Piston Cloud Computing, Inc. is today emerging from stealth and introducing its new enterprise-ready cloud operating system for private clouds called pentOS. The new OS is built on OpenStack, the open source IaaS cloud computing project that now has over 1,450 contributors and 110 participating companies, including NASA, Rackspace, Citrix, Intel, Cisco, Arista Networks, Microsoft and Dell.

With pentOS (Piston Enterprise OSTM), the focus is on the private cloud environment, an area which has been somewhat neglected in today’s OpenStack landscape. The new OS addresses enterprise’s most pressing concerns, including security, compliance and integration with existing systems.

For starters, unlike OpenStack, which is a cloud automation layer, not an operating system, pentOS is bare metal up, built on a hardened Linux distro that doesn’t include anything expect what’s required to run OpenStack. It also includes the industry’s first implementation of CloudAudit, a cross-industry standard launched in early 2010 to automate the process of auditing cloud service providers, and which has become the security standard for OpenStack.

In addition, pentOS comes with Piston CloudKey, essentially a USB stick that lets you edit a single config file to make changes to a private cloud. When you’re ready to deploy those changes, just pop the USB key into a switch, and the switch will automatically install the software to the servers. It’s a 99.99% automated, hand-free installation, says Piston Cloud.

PentOS is based on open standards and is designed to be vendor agnostic. It supports a variety of switches and servers. At present, Arista switches are supported, but those from HP and Force10 will be supported soon. It can also run alongside other public or private cloud environments, including those from Rackspace, Dell, Amazon, Internap, Korea Telecom and more.

The software will be available as a preview starting October 3rd, and will become commercially available on November 29th. Licensing will be on a per server basis and subscription packages will include annual support. Pricing has yet to be determined.

Piston Cloud’s CEO and Co-founder, Joshua McKenty, was technical lead and cloud architect of NASA’s Nebula Cloud Computing Platform, which formed the cornerstone of the OpenStack project. He currently holds an appointed seat on the OpenStack Project Policy Board. Meanwhile, Piston Cloud’s CTO and Co-founder Christopher MacGown was technical lead at Slicehost, acquired by Rackspace in 2008.

The company raised $4.5 million in Series A funding back in July, in a round led by Hummer Winblad and True Ventures, with Divergent Ventures and others participating.

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San Francisco-based Pantheon opened its doors to the public today after a year building its Web development platform for Drupal sites.  (Drupal is an open-source content management system).  Pantheon is a combination of a Web development tool in the cloud and a Web hosting and management service.  Companies can develop, test, host, and manage their websites on Pantheon  It is all based in the cloud, and the service is free for developers.  Once you make a site go live, it costs $100  a month.

The company raised a $1.3 million seed round a year ago from First Round Capital, Baseline, Floodgate, Founder Collective, and Heroku founders James Lindenbaum, Adam Wiggins, and Orion Henry.  You can think of Pantheon as a Heroku for Drupal sites in that it puts the web development environment in the cloud.  Founder and CEo Zack Rosen has  simpler description of what Pantheon offers.  ” You can get an enterprise-complete website for your organization with the level of polish of a consumer-grade site.”

The reason so many corporate and organization websites look out of date is because they are built with expensive, proprietary Web development software that fails to keep up with what is going on in the consumer Web.  Pantheon offers a platform for developing custom sites.  It is built on top of Drupal, which is fast and versatile, but Pantheon makes Drupal development more accessible.  Pantheon makes it easy to deploy different versions of a site on test servers and the live site, as well as backup servers. Some Websites are already running on Pantheon. Customers include the United Nations Global Pulse site, USC Marshall School of Business, and online publisher TheFix.

The unique twist that Pantheon brings to the table is that it is not just a development environment.  Once a site is ready to go live, it runs the site as well.  ”We carry the pager for your website if anything goes down,” says Rosen. It also has done the hard work to optimize Drupal so that every site runs really fast.

Pantheon itself runs on Rackspace Cloud.   Why not Amazon Web Services?  ”Rackspace is much faster at running Drupal than Amazon,” says Rosen.  But the backend is built to make it portable if Pantheon ever decides to move.

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Mobile device management company Zenprise is today introducing its new enterprise-grade mobile DLP (Data Leakage Prevention) that aims to help I.T. departments with the growing “bring your own device” to work trend. The Zenprise Enterprise Mobile DLP will be offered as an optional add-on to the company’s larger solution, the Zenprise Mobile Enterprise Security Framework, when it launches later this fall.

At first, the new product will specifically target iOS devices, including the Apple iPad, but an Android version is in the works.

The problem with I.T.’s lack of control over end user devices is that they’re starting to create a blind spot for companies with sensitive data. Executives are emailing themselves documents and viewing them on their iPads. Other times, they’re accessing them via an online storage service, instead of using traditional, albeit less glamorous, solutions like laptops that access the company’s SharePoint servers.

This is where companies like Zenprise, and its competitors, like Good, Sybase, AirWatch and MobileIron, for example, come in. They help put I.T. back in control of these rogue devices.

With Zenprise’s new Mobile DLP, content can be secured at the data layer, and not by isolating individual applications, as some competing products do, explains Zenprise.

The Mobile DLP client application also integrates with back-end services like SharePoint and Office 365, so users can sync the documents and files they want to their iPhone or iPad without compromising security. I.T. admins can apply policies that then restrict the files from being copied, forwarded to email, or the text pasted into other applications. They can monitor files for unauthorized access and place compliance-related restrictions on the files (like timeouts), too.

The new Enterprise Mobile DLP will launch in October for iPhone and iPad and an Android version will be released before year-end. More information will be available on Zenprise.com.

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