It’s easy to forget that it wasn’t always this way. Remember when you had to delete emails before receiving new ones? Back in the late ’90s, providers like Hotmail and Yahoo allowed users on a couple of megabytes—essentially, the size of a single song.

From Hotmail to Gmail to Dropbox, here’s a look back at some of the key moments in the evolution of free online storage.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout

With Fruux‘s new version, teams can jointly manage address books, calendars and to-do lists, with supported platforms including iOS, Mac OS X, Windows, Android, Linux and BlackBerry. The service also includes a team-management web interface and scheduling support – if a meeting is created in iCal, for example, team members will get requests to find out about availability.

Compared with Fruux Pro, which includes unlimited storage, contacts, calendars and tasks, Fruux Team also adds dedicated support.

There is one big gap in Fruux’s support: Microsoft Outlook. Fruux uses the open CardDAV and CalDAV protocols, and Outlook famously uses the proprietary and license-fee-bearing Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) instead.

However, after Google recently said it was dropping EAS support for Gmail on Windows Phone, Microsoft was sent scrambling for a fix, and that solution seems to include the integration of CalDAV and CardDAV support into Windows Phone.

“That’s great for us,” said Fruux CEO Dominik Tobschall, who noted that this probably meant Outlook would get CardDAV and CalDAV support sooner rather than later.

Team support is a major shift for Fruux, taking the service from a mostly personal syncing tool to one explicitly tailored for teams. Clearly aimed at business users, Fruux Team costs €4 ($5.45) per user per month.

The company is making money elsewhere, though. Tobschall told me that the service is being resold in volume by ISP partners and also being integrated as a white-label sync feature into third-party software (an example here might be a CRM application). However, he was loath to name names.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How tomorrow’s mobile-centric data centers will look
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• NewNet Q2: Google closes the quarter with a bang

Products such Word and Excel have hundreds of time-saving shortcuts, and the fact is people don’t know most of them. With that in mind, a Berlin startup called Veodin Software has launched a new training tool called KeyRocket.

Mercifully, times have changed. For one thing, KeyRocket focuses purely on keyboard shortcuts, unlike Clippy, which seemed to appear at every possible opportunity.

“Microsoft tried to teach you the mainstream. ‘Are you writing a letter?’ Of course I am!” Veodin co-founder Jan Mechtel told me. “We do two things differently. One, we’re really relevant – we wait until we can show you something we know is relevant for you. The other thing is we do it subtly. We don’t move, roll into view and take the focus from everything.”

Indeed, KeyRocket’s little popup is notably less obtrusive than Clippy was. It’s also slightly gamified, which may make it more attractive to some users.

Here’s how it works: KeyRocket runs in the background and, when it sees that you’re going through the menus to access a function such as ‘find’ or ‘save’, it suggests the shortcut for that function. When you then use the shortcut, it congratulates you and moves a little rocket symbol further up a slider – after a few successful uses of the shortcut, it tells you that you’ve learned it, and stops bothering you about it.

Responding to the suggestions obviously takes time in itself, but Veodin maintains that KeyRocket saves time in the long run.

“For businesses, the advantage is that their employees are happy because they get a motivating and fun experience, and the second thing is that time is money. We save a lot of time,” Mechtel said. “Shortcuts are six seconds faster on average. The minimum is three seconds. That doesn’t take into account going to another ribbon; that’s just moving the mouse and clicking.”

For now, KeyRocket’s database offers around 1,600 Windows-only shortcuts for Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint. The lack of Mac support isn’t going to change for a while (“Right now we want a kickass Windows product”) but Veodin’s looking into extending the supported package list to the likes of Photoshop, Visual Studio, SAP and even software development environments.

And, in the future, the company wants to make KeyRocket a bit more proactive. Veodin employs a psychologist and it wants to use the resulting insights to profile its users, aggregate the data and figure out which functions might be worth suggesting to each user.

The company’s also working on creating new shortcuts for the Microsoft and Adobe programs it targets.

“Right now we try to bring users and software closer together by teaching the users,” Mechtel said. “Eventually want to bring the two together by changing the software, for example by adding a shortcut that didn’t exist. For example, if we observe that you always do bold and underline at the same time, nothing stops us from saying, ‘Do you want that to be default behaviour, so when you bold we also underline it?’”

Unlike the trialware model Veodin tested during the KeyRocket beta, the final product is free for all non-commercial use. The plan is for business customers to be honest enough to pay for their use on an annual basis — doing so would also come with other benefits, such as extra help from Veodin in supporting and updating mass deployments.

The year-old company’s funding so far consists of a €100k university grant, which has kept the eight-strong team going until now. More seed funding is apparently en route.

Clippy was a disastrous mascot for shortcut training, but it is a bit silly having hundreds of shortcuts at your disposal and not using them. As long as it stays on the right side of the utility/annoyance divide, KeyRocket may achieve what the cursed paperclip could not.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Google and the Ghost of Silicon Valley Past
• The 2013 task management tools market
• Social 2013: The enterprise strikes back

BetterCloud has raised $2 million for its quest to bring better management and other capabilities to Google Apps. The funding comes from CEO David Politis and unnamed angel investors.

New York-based BetterCloud is also launching the beta of FlashPanel, a new service that helps admins better manage and maintain Google Apps for businesses. FlashPanel eases the standardization of email settings for groups of people and reports on their email usage.

“If a user hasn’t logged in for 30 days, the admin will be alerted. Maybe the user has left the company but the account was never suspended or deleted. We alert you to that,” Politis said.

BetterCloud already launched DomainWatch, a security tool for Google Apps admins. DomainWatch provides an admin dashboard and a policy editor that lets admins specify what material user can share outside their designated domains.

Politis has Google Apps experience from his previous position as VP for Cloud Sherpas, one of the largest Google Apps partners.

Google Apps for Business, which includes Gmail as well as Google Docs and other productivity tools that compete with  Microsoft Office, costs $50 per user per year. BetterCloud mimics that pricing model — DomainWatch starts at $8 per user per year for the base service and $15 per user per year for a premium version.

Google Apps customers include many universities, cities and government accounts (including Los Angeles and  Seattle.)  Other customers include Virgin America airlines and Genentech.

While Google Apps lacks many of the features of the Microsoft Office-Outlook combo, critics say many of those same features go unused and businesses have long chafed at Office’s pricing. That, and the fact that Google launched the cheaper Google Apps in 2007, prompted Microsoft’s hosted Office 365. While Microsoft and Google are the giants here, there are other hosted Office competitors include Zoho.

Photo courtesy of Flickr userakakumo

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What Enterprise Software Vendors Could Learn from the Consumer Space
• A near-term outlook for big data
• Quality of the cloud: best practices for ISVs

The court also found that Facebook was wrong to claim rights over photos and other content uploaded by its users, and that it has to get a user’s consent before sticking their profile picture into Facebook ads.

Despite reports suggesting that the problem had been fixed, however, that may not actually be the case.

Consumer rights group VZBV, which launched the complaint, said it was happy with the ruling — which it hailed as a “milestone” in a statement (auf Deutsch) — a spokesman told me that that there are still significant issues with the way Friend Finder works.

“While the Facebook application in the meantime has been modified slightly, in our opinion it is still insufficient,” VZBV told me.

“Users are still not adequately informed that their entire address book will be imported to Facebook. For example, Facebook sometimes imports the entire address book — including names, addresses and maybe telephone numbers — not only the email addresses.”

VZBV also pointed out that Friend Finder sometimes imports email addresses from the mail client’s outbox or sent mail folder, as well as from the address book.

“The consumer does not know these things. Therefore the consumer cannot assess its consent to import his address book,” the group said.

The group also said it was looking forward to the new EU-wide data privacy rules that the European Commission is proposing — these reforms include the so-called ‘right to be forgotten’, which means social networks and other ‘data controllers’ have to delete personal information about a user when that person asks them to.

Facebook itself hasn’t publicly announced its next move, saying only that it will “take a close look into the details of [the] court decision as soon as they are available and then decide on the next steps.”

Facebook does get a pretty tough time of it in Germany. The country’s history – think the Nazis and the Stasi – is a major factor that makes people there more aware of privacy issues than most. Germany was, in fact, the first country to introduce data protection laws, and it bases its laws on very strict interpretations of wider European Union rules.

German officials have previously taken Facebook to task over its facial tagging systems, ‘Like’ buttons and Facebook Pages. And the Berlin case follows on from Facebook’s 2010 encounter with the Hamburg data protection officials. That time round, the case was dropped after Facebook agreed to let non-members opt out of receiving invitations, and promised to make it more apparent to users when it was sending out emails to their non-member friends.

Not satisfied, the VZBV took Facebook to court in Berlin, complaining that Friend Finder breaches German (and European) data protection laws. The court agreed.

But Facebook isn’t the only U.S. company to hit such problems — Google has given up on updating its Street View imagery for Germany, following widespread protests from the public and officials.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1
• How social discovery is transforming entertainment
• Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated

Xobni allows users to integrate Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Skype and other services with their Outlook inboxes. But it looks like the company will have something new coming up…

When asked for comment, a Xobni spokesperson sent the following statement:

“We’ve signed a commercial agreement, and as part of that agreement, the partnering company invested money in Xobni. The nature of the agreement will become more obvious as we roll out products.”

Ok! So we’ll look forward to this major partner being announced at some point. In the meantime, Xobni released contact management tools for Gmail, iOS and Android. Xobni also hired away WebOS app development chief Michael Rizkalla.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Social Inbox vs. The Future of Email
• How social discovery is transforming entertainment
• Personal tools lead to practical business

That’s the principle behind year old, Los Altos, Calif. startup Whodini, which is currently in pilot. A sort of extremely pumped up address book or internal LinkedIn alternative, the product scours the Outlook accounts of employees of large companies, analyzing the content automatically to create a profile for each person, which lists their areas of expertise.

This profile is searchable by employees anywhere in the company, whether they’re based in Mumbai, India or Menlo Park, Calif. So if a sales guy in Chicago is looking for an expert on a prospective client or a complicated technical subject, all he needs to do is search Whodini to find colleagues in any part of the world with the knowledge he needs.

Making sense of the mess

Of course, our email accounts are messy places, full of invitations to lunch or maybe even personal missives about topics we’d rather not have broadcast to the company. But they’re also a very rich source of information, explains Co-Founder, President and COO Ani Chaudhuri, using a revealing back of the envelope calculation:

In a large company people send out between 30-50 emails in a day, so lets take the average of 40. Each email, and this is statistical, is about 60 words, so that’s about 2,400 words per day. Now 2,400 words times 200 is 480,000. That’s almost half a million words written every year by an employee.

Contrast that with the once- or twice-daily updates to enterprise social media – and the very rare times, instigated by HR nagging, that people update their profile in traditional company directories – and it’s clear why Whodini focuses on email and why, with the right analysis, that data could prove so useful. Whodini aims to make sense of that disorder and make the results searchable, with the minimum amount of effort on the part of users – no laborious updating, hashtagging or other effort required.

“People document stuff already; it was just not in a form in which it was usable. Our job is to take all that data that is floating around and making it accessible. We are an analytics company rather than a communication company,” says Chaudhuri.

And don’t fret that Whodini will accidentally reveal your embarrassing love of Civil War re-enactments or confidential negotiations. “We show the profile to you before anyone else can see it or search it. It’s all permissions-based,” stresses Bjorn Stromsness, the company’s director of business development, noting that users have absolute control of what goes public. Profiles are also constantly refreshed with users’ expertise in a given area decaying over time, so out-of-date keywords are unlikely to appear on profiles.

Who’s Whodini for?

Whodini isn’t for everyone, as the ability to pinpoint specialized knowledge is more valuable, and more difficult, in some contexts. “If you have a company of 10,000, but 9,000 of them are retail employees, you’re not going to find a lot of utility in what we’re doing,” says Stromsness.

But if yours is the type of firm that has expert knowledge spread across a large organization, the Whodini teams feels its product can make a big impact. “We see the product fitting particularly well within technology, energy, pharma and legal and consulting worlds,” says Stromsness. Large firms of 10,000 should derive the greatest benefit. “The more people you have [who are] having complex conversations, the better we’re going to work for you,” concludes Stromsness.

The product is also probably more beneficial for some types of employees than others, the team concedes. Braggarts and self-promoters, for instance, won’t prosper on Whodini as its evidence-based approach rewards no points for horn-tooting skills. Instead, the product is “the voice of the quiet achiever,” in the words of Stromsness.

“When people are self-nominating themselves for things, sometimes those are more aspiration than they are actual,” says Stromsness. But with Whodini, “everything is validated. If you want to know who’s dealing with a topic, you can find out who’s actually having those conversations as opposed to the person who might want to have those conversations.”

Forget notices of cookies in the break room or chatty camaraderie, Whodini takes a no-nonsense approach to work. “This isn’t about finding out if you’re passionate about cats. This is about finding out if you have worked on UI concepts,” says Stromsness.

What’s next?

The company has raised $2 million in angel funding, and the product is currently deployed in three locations with one more due to be added this week and a large company pilot in the works, but there’s no definitive date for a public launch as of yet. So what is on the horizon for Whodini?

Looking more long-term, the Whodini team isn’t troubled by constant chatter that email might be on its way out. According to Chaudhuri, rumors of email’s demise are highly exaggerated. “Instant messengers are being replaced by enterprise social networking. Email is not going anywhere,” he says.  And even if communication should move to another channel in the future, “we will absolutely tap into that,” says Chaudhuri.

In fact, future plans include connecting to “other email clients and maybe other sources of unstructured data as well,” according to Stromsness. Other product improvements in the works include scores, which measure each person’s level of expertise in a particular topic, and a once-a-week alert showing users who in the company is working on similar things and worth getting in touch with.

And as the product develops, another hot trend in the business world could benefit Whodini — the rise of remote working and dispersed organizations can only help a firm whose aids people in pinpointing exact expertise spread across the globe.

“The way we look at it is the current platforms, whether it is email, social networking or collaboration tools, all of them assume that you know the people that you need to know – the right people are already at the table. Are the right people really at the table? By discovering people that you don’t know we increase the possibility of having better people,” says Chaudhuri.

Who wouldn’t want to know the perfect person at that critical point in time? It’s a fabulous concept which all depends on the quality of the analysis whirring unseen inside the black box of Whodini’s proprietary technology. Pretty soon public, real world field tests will prove if this is not only an awesome idea, but also an awesome product.

At Net:Work, we’ll explore how companies can harness social tools — and the data from them — both now and in the not-so-distant future. The event will be held in San Francisco on Dec. 8.

Image courtesy of Whodini.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A near-term outlook for big data
• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout

Unlike Gmail’s forgotten attachment reminder, CodeTwo’s plugin is user-configurable. You can add to or modify the list of keywords it looks for, alter the text of the alert, and you can also opt to have the application scan the email body, subject line or both (the default). Handily, Outlook Attachment Reminder only scans material you write, so if you compose a reply and the quoted original message includes one or more of the keywords the program looks for, it won’t trigger an alert.

Outlook Attachment Reminder is freeware and can be downloaded from the CodeTwo website.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Social Inbox vs. The Future of Email
• How social discovery is transforming entertainment
• Personal tools lead to practical business

Harmon.ie provides an interface for Microsoft SharePoint directly within Outlook. It simplifies collaboration and document version control by letting users send live links to SharePoint documents, rather than emailing individual docs that are hard to manage. Users can edit, rate, or tag documents, and see and manage previous versions, all directly inside Outlook. According to the developers, enterprises that have large investments in SharePoint have found that using Harmon.ie has increased end-user SharePoint adoption from 30 percent to as high as 80 percent..

Harmon.ie 3.0, being released Tuesday in beta, adds social features that recognize that collaboration is about people as much as documents. The new “people” tab in the Harmon.ie sidebar lets users see colleagues’ profiles and availability. Presence notifications are geared toward work environments, since they can be used to show what project or document an individual is working on. The people tab also displays a multi-threaded activity stream, and lets workers call, chat or video conference using Microsoft Lync/OCS, Lotus Sametime or Cisco UC.

Harmon.ie 3.0 also simplifies the creation of ad-hoc groups centered around a specific task. The “suggested colleagues” feature recommends possible group members based on the frequency of interaction (by email, chat or voice) and by whether they have co-authored or co-edited documents in the past.

Since Simon wrote about Harmon.ie a few months ago, several other apps have added some similar features to the email interface, for the simple reason that many workers in the enterprise spend a lot of their time there. Xobni, for example, offers “gadgets” for such enterprise collaboration tools as SharePoint, and several services, notably Rapportive and Gist, provide social connections directly from the email interface. And for organizations that don’t use SharePoint, Egnyte recently announced tools for file-sharing within Outlook.

Harmon.ie 3.0 is currently available in beta. The free version includes the SharePoint interface, but does not include the social features. The enterprise version of the software, which includes the social components, is priced at $125 per user, or on a subscription basis for $50 per user per year. In addition to the SharePoint version, the developer also offers a version for Lotus Notes, and another for Google Docs, although the latter does not currently include social features.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Social Media in the Enterprise
• Millennials in the enterprise, part 2: benchmarking IT’s readiness for the new digital workforce
• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce

The first crop of gadgets includes tools for web-based document sharing, lead tracking, issue reporting and monitoring, and note-taking, such as:

• An Evernote gadget that automatically displays notes containing the name or email address of a particular contact, and allows adding and editing.
• A Dropbox tool for finding files and sharing them by creating links that are entered into email messages. Drag-and-drop file sending is planned for the future.
• A JIRA bug tracker tool that allows programmers to update project status inline.
• A Google Translate tool that automatically translates entire conversations, both incoming and outgoing. Xobni says that the translations are good enough to be helpful for use in customer support.
• A WebEx tool to schedule meetings, and start them on the fly.

Other gadgets available today include:

• Productivity: GoldMail
• Collaboration: Huddle and Microsoft SharePoint
• Content: Facebook, Flickr, Hoover’s, Klout, LinkedIn, Twitter, Xing, YouTube, Yelp
• CRM: Salesforce CRM

Xobni was one of the first companies to bring “social CRM” services to the inbox, but has more recently seen significant competition from the likes of Rapportive, Gist and Liaise. By hooking into third-party services, the gadgets can offer offer additional capabilities not offered by Xobni’s competitors.

When I spoke with Xobni representatives recently, they said that the rationale for developing this platform was simple: research shows that in the enterprise, people spend 38 percent of their screen time in Outlook, so it makes sense to make Outlook as capable as possible.

Xobni says that its system relies on open APIs, and it is based on OpenSocial. Developers can create their own gadgets; they can be created with straightforward web development tools. The infrastructure can even be hosted on intranets to take advantage of corporate LDAP servers. Gadgets are not yet part of Xobni for Gmail beta, but they are on the way.

The new Xobni gadgets are available from the company’s website. Most of the Xobni Gadgets are free, but the JIRA and Saleforce gadgets are priced at $9.99 per user per year. Xobni handles billing and payment for developers.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How to Manage Consumer-Grade Collaborative Tools in the Workplace
• NewNet 2012: companies and technologies set to disrupt
• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce