Bitrix24, the enterprise social network created specifically for small to midsized businesses, has released a new version of its cloud service and beefed up its telephony, CRM and collaboration features for its 1 million users.

Image: Bitrix24

The company is headquartered in Alexandria, VA and employs over 140 employees across Kaliningrad, Moscow, Minsk, Kiev, Saint Petersburg and Almaty.

The new version includes activity streams and reporting tools for leads, managers and invoices. Integration with Zingaya's VoxImplant product means web phone calls can be made and recorded directly without any IP-telephony equipment, server or complicated setup from your Bitrix24 account.

Bitrix24.Drive, which functions as a free Dropbox alternative for companies that want to have full control over their data, supports company and group files in addition to personal files.

Companies that use the Professional plan can have 1TB of data storage without any change in pricing. Project Management and time management modules have been integrated to allow tracking of time spent by each employee on tasks.

“This is the fourth major update of Bitrix24 this year, and this rapid pace of improvement is one of the reasons that we reached the milestones of both 100,000 company signups and 1 million total users this fall, growing even faster than Yammer before Microsoft’s acquisition.”

“Small businesses like the fact that they can now replace Yammer, MS Office, Salesforce, Dropbox, Basecamp and Skype with a single out-of-the-box solution that does all that they do and costs only a hundred dollars per month.”

Not only is it much cheaper, it solve(s) a lot of interoperability, deployment, administration and shadow IT issues,” said Dmitry Valyanov, president of Bitrix Inc.

Bitrix24 has a mobile app optimised for iOS7. It has data caching and an offline mode that lets users access the intranet whilst on the road.

The mobile CRM, allows users to create or edit CRM entries and invoices directly from a mobile device. The mobile app also lets you log in to multiple Bitrix24 accounts from a single smartphone or tablet.

The instant messenger module gives access to video conferencing and screen sharing capabilities for up to 4 meeting participants. Email connectors to Outlook, Gmail and iCloud are provided. Integration with MailChimp is also available to download from the Bitrix24 marketplace.

“On good week(s), over ten thousand people download our mobile app, so it’s certainly a critical part of our business” added Valyanov.

“GooglePlay now lists Bitrix24 among the top five mobile intranet apps, alongside or surpassing such established enterprise social brands as Jive Software, IBM Connection, VMWare SocialCast and TIBCO Tibbr. So we must be doing something right.”

Bitrix24 is free to any company or organization with up to 12 users. The paid cloud plans are priced at $99/mo (50 GB) and $199/mo (100 GB), and both come with unlimited users.