Enterprise social network and collaboration specialist Bitrix24 has released a new version of its free software for smaller businesses. The new product allows users to create, edit and collaborate on documents online, without having MS Office installed on their PCs.

Bitrix 24 has its own instant messenger for video and group chats, in addition users now have access to video conferencing and screen sharing capabilities. Email connectors allow it to work with MS Exchange, Outlook, Gmail, AOL, Yahoo!, iCloud and other popular mail services.

The new release also has an enhanced Activity Stream with real time updates, smart forwarding, notification options and company-wide announcements, while an engagement analytics module (Company Pulse) has been added to provide real time indicators for enterprise social network adoption. This helps identify roadblocks and slow adopters, and shows which intranet tools are currently being utilized by employees.

There's also a new mobile app which allows access to multiple Bitrix24 accounts from a single device. It has a mobile CRM feature too which lets users create and edit CRM entries and invoices directly from a mobile device.

"2013 has been a year of significant growth for us," says Bitrix24 CEO Dmitry Valyanov. "We’ve signed up 90,000 companies, which is well over 500,000 users for the cloud and onsite versions of Bitrix24 intranet. Our workforce grew by 40 percent to over 130 employees and we opened three new sales and support offices. GooglePlay now lists Bitrix24 among the top 5 mobile intranet apps, along with or surpassing such established enterprise social brands as Jive Software, IBM Connection, VMWare SocialCast and TIBCO Tibbr. We hope to have a million users by the end of the year".

Bitrix24 is free to any organization with up to 12 employees with paid cloud plans available for larger businesses. To find out more and sign up for the free version visit www.bitrix24.com.

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