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Central Desktop releases Microsoft Office Web collaboration tool (Press release)

Central Desktop today released Central Desktop for Office, a Web-based collaboration platform that integrates with Microsoft Office. The tool allows users to collaboratively and simultaneously edit Word, Excel, and Powerpoint documents over the Internet. Central Desktop acknowledges that Office 2010 includes co-authoring capabilities, but says that its product is a cost-effective alternative to an Office 2010 upgrade. It is positioned as an alternative to SharePoint for SMBs.

IBM acquires business analytics cloud service provider Unica (Press release)

IBM last Friday announced that it would acquire Unica Corporation for $480 million. Unica is a provider of SaaS and on-premise business analytics and process acceleration tools. It will be incorporated into the Business Analytics and Optimization consulting organization at IBM, where it will join recent acquisitions Coremetrics and Cognos, among others. Powerful SaaS BI integrations can be expected.

T-shirt vendor Threadless succeeds with SaaS e-mail marketing (Press release)

There’s a fine line between welcomed product updates and immediately deleted corporate spam, and it seems that most companies send the latter. So that a community-driven company like funny tee-shirt vendor Threadless can succeed with e-mail marketing seems to suggest the technology can now meet the needs of the not-so-heartless. Threadless used ExactTarget, a Web-based marketing platform that integrates with Salesforce CRM, Microsoft Dynamics, Omniture and Webtrends, to create successful e-mail and social network marketing campaigns.