HyLighter, is a new document collaboration service now in beta testing. It delivers benefits unavailable in more generic online collaboration services — most notably, HyLighter has an intuitive color-coding scheme that highlights (hence the name) areas of concern to the business team.

HyLighter tracks comments and suggested changes separately, similar to Microsoft Office products, so they don’t obscure the original document. You can only do mark-ups in the HyLighter application. Actual changes can’t be made, which might make it unsuitable for some users. However, in situations where tracking collaborators’ concerns are important, it can be a useful tool in an online meeting or used in conjunction with video conferencing or web conferencing.

Being that HyLighter is still in beta testing, I wouldn’t recommend relying on it exclusively while working with important clients and documents. It does look to be a promising technology, and being a completely web-based application allows cross-platform compatibility without having to worry about downloading and installing additional software.

Today, Adobe announced an updated version of its comprehensive web conferencing application, Adobe Connect Pro. The new version of Connect Pro includes new functionality that enriches online collaboration, enabling more engaging rapid training, interactive virtual classes and dynamic online meetings.

Acrobat Connect Pro includes many new features for web conferencing such as options for archiving and editing recorded online meetings. The application integrates popular instant messaging clients, and powerful usage reporting tools.

eLearning enhancements include “break-out rooms” to let students in virtual classes initiate separate conversations online, rapid authoring of video conferencing content, integration with Learning Management Systems such as the popular Blackboard and SumTotal, and tools that track and organize online classes. Users can easily modify and tailer training sessions as they see fit and can create an environment that is remarkably similar to meeting in person.

Everyone has their favorite collaboration tools for chat, blogs, video conferencing, photos, booking-marking and we all use more than one. The problem is that the majority of these applications don’t work well together and we end up having the hassle of keeping track of all of these different sources of information.

Grou.ps has set out to fix this problem, by creating a platform that integrates all of these collaboration services with a single login. The system supports photos, chat, forums, calendars, blogs, wikis, maps, profiles, all which are available as a separate plugin to add to your Grou.ps account.

While having just gone beta today, Grou.ps already has over 150K members and 10K groups internationally. Grou.ps however has quite a bit of competition. Ning and Wetpaint have integrated forums and various forms of media into their community products. Google and Zoho also have compelling collaboration suites with a similar single login that gets you chat, email, audio and video teleconferencing, presentations, documents, wikis, and many other tools. Grou.ps is backed by Golden Horn Ventures.