oneDrum.com has been in beta for about a year, and its features and people will be integrated into the main Yammer platform. The idea is to incorporate the various Office files that individuals work on into its collaboration network to make them easier to jointly author or edit.

Users will be able to see files that are organized by particular Yammer groups on their desktop, once they download a Windows (and soon Mac) desktop app. So every Yammer group becomes, in essence, a shared folder that is synchronized through their cloud.

There are other desktop sync services, of course, such as Evernote and Dropbox, but none is tied to a microblogging service. Each Yammer file lives at a unique URL where it can be viewed in the browser, followed, shared and discussed. "Following" a file will notify the user of changes. Users can also view a revision history or search the full text of the file from within Yammer. This is very powerful and promises to make collaboration a lot easier than it is now with Google Docs, for example.

Speaking of Google Docs, its users have long had the ability to jointly edit and comment on their documents. But the oneDrum software moves this to your desktop Microsoft Office files, which may make it more comfortable for many companies. The user doesn't have to do anything special, once the desktop app is installed. As with Google Docs, character-by-character changes in the document appear in real time.

As mentioned, oneDrum has been in beta for Windows users, but starting today the beta software is no longer available (boo for Yammer). It will be incorporated into a summer release and rebranded as part of Yammer, along with a planned Mac release. Yammer also plans on moving all 10 oneDrum employees from the UK to its San Francisco office eventually, barring any immigration issues.

Jasper Westaway was the CEO of oneDrum. Ironically, when he first met with the Yammer executives about a year ago, the oneDrum demo was miserable. Obviously, that didn't deter them from working together.

Here is a demo video that shows off the integration and covers some additional features:

Dashpot lets users configure their dashboard with exactly the information they need. For example, users can visualize their data in the form of line graphs, heat maps, geographic maps, counters, pie charts, or lists. You can also customize with selects, filters and sorts, to let users setup drilldowns for zooming in and out on their data, too.This lets users of different types and skill levels create multiple views depending on who is interacting with a given dashboard, and also specify what information each view should show.

Here is a short video that explains the service:

Dashpot is part of the overall Infochimps platform, which starts off at $5,000 monthly, and specific pricing depends on the options selected for subscription and the hosting environment: public or private cloud. We have written about the company before, including here when we saw them at the 2011 SXSW show. The platform is quite powerful and has been used by a number of commercial vendors for cloud-based Big Data projects.

This chart, supplied by Druva, compares their features to other leading players. One of the key features is that for users with multiple devices, all data is available from any device, including both desktop and Web interfaces.

Pricing for the inSync cloud solution is $6 per user, per month, and the on-premises version is $4 per user, per month. The InSync product will be available next month.

The new version can provide more insight into what is going on inside your servers, as you can see in the screenshot above. For example, you can find out what processes are consuming abnormal amounts of memory or CPU cycles. RevealCloud can handle physical, virtual, and cloud systems. The monitoring is all browser-based, and CopperEgg provides full functionality for up to two servers to try it out, with paid versions for more servers.

The issue is that the cloud is chaotic: servers come and go and it is hard to use traditional firewall products amongst all these changing IP addresses and network configurations. Halo NetSec is expressly designed for this environment and logically groups servers by application to make it easier to view the security policies, as you can see from the screen shot below. So you can set up rules between all your app servers and your database servers, for example.

Another feature, which has been part of the Halo Pro package, is what they call GhostPorts. CloudPassage has worked with Yubico's USB two-factor authentication keys to make remote communications with your cloud-based servers more secure. Typically, you open up an SSH terminal session with your cloud server, and that can be a vulnerability for someone who is attempting to attack your server. What Halo GhostPorts does is tie that session with a user who has the USB key so that no one can see an open port or have access via SSH. You can see how this sorts out on its management console below:

There are three different pricing plans for Halo: There is a free Halo Basic plan that can be deployed on up to 25 servers. Next level up is NetSec, which costs 3.5 cents per server hour. The top tier is the Pro plan which costs 10 cents per server hour. There are volume discounts for multiple servers. More information on Halo's pricing and plans can be found here.

Software being developed for Windows Embedded POSReady 7 will be shown ascertaining live data about the people they scan - including their estimated gender, height, weight, ethnicity, and age - and produce live ads tailored and targeted directly to the estimated demographic. And as the technology's product manager told ReadWriteWeb today, business intelligence and analytics functions networked to those systems will enable advertising managers to literally change and create campaigns for those live shoppers on-the-fly.

"Imagine you're in a mall and you're walking by various stores," begins Windows Embedded director of product management John Doyle. "But in one of the stores, you see a digital sign integrated into the front window of the store. It's showing content about what's in the store and it attracts your interest. As you walk towards the digital sign, it recognizes you because it's using Kinect. We have integrated Microsoft Kinect with the digital sign, and it recognizes the individual."

On the back end of this operation is software co-developed with consumer engagement services provider Razorfish, that utilizes to estimate your personal characteristics using the data gleaned from the Kinect-gathered image. This software, as Microsoft will show at NRF, should make a disarmingly accurate estimate of your age.

"Automatically, the digital sign - because of its ability to connect to the back end and process that information - can immediately change the content that is being viewed on the digital sign," continues Doyle. This way, a store billboard truly can market to youngsters, first by ascertaining that there are youngsters standing in front of it.

Perhaps a high-end department store on the order of Nordstrom, Doyle suggested, could tailor suggestions for such things as outdoor gear, dresses, and accessories based on the real-time data that the Kinect camera gleans from the shopper staring at its digital sign. It might not even be out of the question for software to estimate the shopper's tastes in fashion based upon what she's wearing at the time.

Video of Microsoft's CES 2012 demonstration of a shopper trying on clothes without changing her own. Posted to YouTube by shopping services provider Retrevo.com.

At CES 2012 this week, Microsoft showed select customers the portion of next week's NRF demonstration that features the virtual clothes-changing program. Here, a shopper sees herself in digital outfits that are superimposed on the camera image of herself, which is shown in reverse in order to simulate a mirror. The shopper may make gestures to interact with "charms" (as Microsoft now calls function icons, beginning with Windows 8) along the top that change the function of the program.

At this point, the functionality is a little crude. Actually, it's a bit like dressing up a member of The Sims. Simulated clothes, while three-dimensional, are stiff and appear self-illuminated, which may not necessarily lend itself to the most flattering presentation. But you can see where Microsoft is going with this. You can imagine a more evolved form of this prototype using a physics engine to approximate the weight and the shimmer of the fabric, as well as apply the same lighting characteristics as are used in the room, so that dresses don't look like they're being held up with garden wire.

If you were wondering how Microsoft would leverage the shopper's personal copy of Windows or Windows Phone into the mix, here it comes: If the user has a Windows Phone, the Windows Embedded kiosk may be able to send snapshots and other data about the interaction to that phone. Conceivably - although Doyle acknowledges there are already multiple privacy issues involved - the kiosk could glean more information about the shopper via near-field communication.

A lot of this assumes that the kiosk software gets it right. Can the software really guess your age, for instance? If a human being guessed the shopper's gender wrong, it would probably lead to a no-sale. Doyle responded that the display software might not have to make the right call all the time. It only applies its estimate during the attraction phase, when it's trying to get the shopper to come closer. You don't blame a store today for showing you signage featuring kids clothes even though you're not a kid.

As these kiosks interact with customers nationwide, Microsoft's Doyle projects a setup where data gleaned from those interactions may be mined in real time by business intelligence software on the back end. Franchise managers could ascertain which items are hot and which are not. And in cases where kiosks are previewing items that are still being sewn in the factories, those managers could make inventory decisions at that point about how many to order. Real-time interest data could be mapped and compared according to a franchise's various regions and coverage zones.

Doyle admits this setup could give shoppers in California and elsewhere on the West Coast a certain advantage. Live ad campaigns could be deployed first on the East Coast, and tailored for maximum attractiveness and efficiency as the sun passes over the Central and Mountain time zones. "In a single slice of a day, you could optimize that business intelligence, from East Coast to West Coast, very, very quickly," he remarks.

Though Microsoft's CES demo involved ordinary HDTV displays, the NRF demo could utilize a new display concept from technology partner Intel, announced just yesterday, featuring a 7-foot, 6-inch-tall multitouch glass screen.

The NRF Expo will be held at the Javits Center in New York beginning next Monday, January 16. Microsoft will be distributing its display over booths 1337, 1334, 1239, 1238, and 983.

Cloud pricing comparisons can be tricky: things change, and they change quite often and without much notice. So just because you went to a particular Web site and got one quote today doesn't mean that the vendor won't adjust things tomorrow and render all your research obsolete. Amazon is fond of actually reducing its prices quite frequently as it buys new and cheaper equipment, for example.

This complexity has brought with it a new class of products that attempt to predict your consumption of cloud resources and there are various tools that are now around that help you compare these costs. Cloudsizer is just the latest in this market space. What is appealing about them is that they have such a wide net to compare prices: most of the ones below look at Amazon and one or two others. With Cloudsizer, you can look at particular packages of VMs and get into making adjustments on the overall RAM and storage for each one. Here is a graph showing you, based on some assumptions for eight to ten VMs, of some popular providers (GoGrid is way more expensive, based on our assumptions):

Other costing calculators that we have covered in the past include:

• Zenoss offers a variety of cloud monitoring and costing products. We last wrote about them here.

• Uptime Software has its Uptime Cloud (which we last wrote about here)that will show you the current costs of all your running instances, as well as make recommendations for how to save money by changing your cloud configuration. Right now it just works with Amazon but more services are planned.

• Cloud Cruiser is another tool that is available for both private and public cloud environments.

• vKernel provides a free capacity planning tool called Capacity View. The tool is Windows-only and connects to your vCenter or ESX server and quickly gives you a lay of your virtual landscape. While much of this information is available through various VMware consoles and displays, it is nice to have everything consolidated into a single dashboard. We last wrote about them here.

The Spanish company will have v3 available early next year, and what is noteworthy is its set of features that include support for multitenancy, app-specific SLAs, and role-based access controls. For example, Recovery Time Objectives and Recovery Point Objectives can be set individually for each application, and some early customers are actually running test recoveries every day to ensure that their data and apps are protected.

"For the longest time, Disaster Recovery has been narrowly focused on data protection, without an integrated view over the entire collection of assets that interoperate to deliver IT as a service," said Carlos Escapa, their CEO. "With ReliableDR 3.0, VirtualSharp delivers an integrated, vertical Disaster Recovery solution across the IT stack, from storage to application, that can be delivered for cloud environments using a zero-footprint, self service architecture." I met with Escapa (a former manager at both VMware and CA) yesterday on his press tour and he was very engaging and convincing: I hope the actual RaaS is equally so.

The service starts out at approximately $10,000 for smaller networks, and is being used by some larger installations already.

RevealCloud gives you the ability to track your servers whether they are VMs or in a public cloud provider as well as the actual physical machines too. There are now two pricing tiers: a free one that can look at up to three servers and give you the past five minutes' history. If you want more, you can pay about $5 per month per server for 30 day history for unlimited servers, along with alerts sent to a variety of devices including email, SMS and pagers. They claim you can be up and running within a few seconds, and their service is that easy to get going. Everything is presented on Web-based dashboards too.

It monitors your corporate and personal Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare and Gowalla accounts under a single interface. You can get a consolidated single activity stream, contact management and brand monitoring. There are a number of customized reports, and here you see their latest dashboard.

Pricing remains the same at $9 per month per user with a 30-day free trial and more expensive options available.

We last wrote about them earlier this summer, covering their Total Security 2012 product. and last covered cloud-based endpoint tools in August when we wrote about Digital Persona.

Panda, McAfee and others have had cloud-based security tools for some time, and ForeScout is getting into this market with their announcement today for managed service providers.