Neudesic’s Pulse 2.0 Adds More Social Features, Microsoft Stack Integration Options Beyond Dynamics CRM, SharePoint

If you happen to be a vendor of social enterprise software that provides, let's say, activity feeds for Microsoft Dynamics CRM, then by the time the November 2011 Service Update for Dynamics CRM Online came out you'd better hope your product team had already moved into more sophisticated social cases.  For Microsoft partner Neudesic and their Pulse product, the latest version now offers more out-of-the box integration options and a better story to tell around the idea of a social fabric inside and outside the enterprise.

The latest release, Pulse 2.0, which is available for on-premise as well as cloud deployments, builds on the original release by adding social tasks and groups features for focused online team building and collaboration, as well as improvements to the user interface. For example, with Pulse's Unified Activity Stream users can follow a document SharePoint, get alerts when changes are made, then add relevant comments in Dynamics CRM, and escalate it to a Lync session at any time.

The product also makes a push into cross-organization collaboration with Pulse Groups, which allows users to create external groups to securely collaborate with customers and partners using Pulse Bridge. They can share files and links, assign tasks and find answers and experts from one location. They can even assign their group a custom email address and collaborate via Outlook.

Another new feature, Pulse Social Tasks, allows users to create a whole conversation around a task, making project management more collaborative. Version 2.0 offers also more than 100 interface enhancements, including a significantly streamlined navigation ...