Bitrix24 to offer all-in-one social enterprise app fro mobile

Rating: And it’s free to firms with less than 12 people

Social networking does work. GoMobile News received a hot tip via LinkedIn from Dmitry Valyanov from Bitrix24 about the impending release of the mobile versions (iOS and Android app) of his company’s software. Bitrix24 puts of whole host of common enterprise activities – task management, document sharing, and time tracking, into just this one social networking style app. As he Dmitry says, why have one account for BaseCamp and another for DropBox and another for SugarCRM and another one for social networking Not only is this expensive, it’s impractical as well. And the good news is that for companies with 12 or fewer employees, the software is still free.If you think about the bits needed to create a Bitrix24 style product, you’d need Yammer (social enterprise); BaseCamp (project management); Zoho (CRM); DropBox (file sharing and online doc management) plus a few other PIM-style facilities.

Bitrix24.com has been launched on PC back in April 2012 and the service is currently available in English (Bitrix24.com), German (Bitrix24.de) and Russian (Bitrix24.ru).

That software is still in beta but the company plans to drop beta this Fall (September or October 2012) when it will release the iOS and Android clients, too.

In essence, Bitrix24 is social intranet as SaaS and to make it affordable to small businesses, the company uses a freemium model with two paid plans ($99 and $199 a month) along with the free version, of course.

What do you get for free? Well free CRM; free project manager; free calendar; free ToDo lists; free doc sharing (5GB limit); free activity stream; and messaging.

Dmitry was at great pains to point out that his company’s paid plans are very different from how others charge – especially Yammer which Microsoft recently bought for $1.2 billion.

Rivals charge for every extra user but with Bitrix24, you can have as many users as you want on paid plans – hundreds or thousands – it doesn’t matter.

However, the company does charge for its cloud storage. Paid plans are limited to 50 GB and 100 GB respectively, but if you want more than that you’ll have to pay extra.

On a triumphant note, Dmitry pointed out that Bitrix24 has achieved all of this and still managed to be 100 per cent self-funded. Eat your heart out Microsoft – you probably bought the wrong company.