Google took another step toward giving its Apps suite an enterprise social networking (ESN) component with the new activity stream feature for the Drive cloud storage piece.
Google said in a blog post that Drive's activity stream is "a single, easy-to-view place to review every action taken on your files and folders."
"You'll see a rundown of what your team has been doing, such as editing and commenting on team notes, adding a new spreadsheet, renaming a presentation, sharing with your boss and more," wrote Ian Gunn, Google Drive Interaction Designer.
By clicking on a specific file or folder, users will be able to see a list of actions related to it, according to Google.
Apps, a cloud email and collaboration suite for businesses, has been around since 2006, but Google hasn't yet developed an ESN component for it. Some customers and analysts believe Google should speed up its efforts to give ESN capabilities to Apps.
It has been assumed that Apps' ESN features would be anchored in a workplace version of the Google+ social networking site. So it's interesting that this activity stream is showing up instead in Drive, the suite's cloud storage component that is deeply integrated with the suite's office productivity apps for word processing, presentations and spreadsheets.
Google+ isn't yet an official part of Apps, but customers can choose to make it available for their users.
Google didn't immediately respond to a request for comment and more details about Drive's activity stream and its ESN plans for Apps.
ESN software has become very popular in recent years because it provides Twitter- and Facebook-like functionality for workplace use, including employee profiles, activity streams, discussion groups, microblogging, commenting, document sharing and other social media features.
ESN software is designed to complement companies' existing communication and collaboration products, like email, IM, office productivity apps, audio and video conferencing, by providing additional ways for employees to interact with each other.
Microsoft spent US$1.2 billion in 2012 to buy ESN vendor Yammer in order to boost the ESN features of SharePoint, Office 365 and several other of its business software products.
Pure-play ESN vendors include Jive Software and NewsGator, while some larger vendors have their own ESN products, including Tibco (Tibbr), IBM (Connections), Cisco (WebEx Social) and Salesforce.com (Chatter.)
Juan Carlos Perez covers enterprise communication/collaboration suites, operating systems, browsers and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Juan on Twitter at @JuanCPerezIDG.
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