VENTURA, Calif. (CN) - A class action claims that a financial services company and its bank partner prey on college students by coercing them into handing over financial aid money and charging them exorbitant fees to access the funds.

This week, Ellucian (formerly Datatel+SGHE) announced the 2012 Outstanding Contributors in the companys’ customer collaboration community – The Commons.  Since 2010, The Commons has been hosted within edu1world.org  and is powered by the social business platform from Enterprise Hive- HiveSocial.

There is a new reason to consider solutions from Enterprise Hive. The company is SWaM certified. Expenditures with Enterprise Hive for HiveSocial Blogs, Campus Intranets, Project Communities and Learning Communities along with expenditures to edu1world qualify for SWaM reporting. 

Enterprise Hive announces the opening of the Career Center on edu1world.org. In a depressed job market, individuals are interested in keeping current on the best opportunities for career development more than ever.

Enterprise Hive is pleased to unveil the edu Solutions Community, which will enable colleges and universities to have private online conversations about vendor solutions, experiences with vendors and the quality of vendor services. Sponsored by Ball State University and hosted on edu1world.org, the community will help colleges and universities share and find much-needed unbiased information about specific vendors and products quickly.

edu1world.org, the leading higher education collaboration network, went live July 18th with major technical and functional enhancements. The site was upgraded to HiveSocial(TM) version 3.0, which has allowed for the edu1world.org Graphical User Interface to be completely redesigned, including enhanced navigation and a more intuitive home page. Additionally, this release enables edu1world to host HiveSocial Now(TM) for Education.

Enterprise Hive’s software-as-a -service collaboration platform HiveSocial™ has been upgraded to Microsoft’s .NET 4.0 Framework. This upgrade provides a technology infrastructure that rapidly allows customers more flexibility to connect to existing applications with their on-line communities. In addition, significant enhancements were developed to optimize user engagement. These enhancements include simplified content creation, ameliorated content search and sharper navigation.

LinkedIn reached an important milestone this week.  Over 100,000 million people have joined LinkedIn and the company sent personal emails to the first 100,000.

According to the email that I received, I'm LinkedIn user number 9,617. 

In the past few months, Enterprise Hive has added three new members to the team. In January Enterprise Hive added a Social Marketing team of two to its staff.  Most recently, Joan Leonard joined Enterprise Hive as VP, Business Development.