Clearspace Server Syndication Feed

Clearspace 2.5 Officially Announced

matt — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 04:17:46 GMT

Thanks to everyone that's participated in the 2.5 beta -- we're finally ready to officially announce Clearspace 2.5! Check out the main Jive website for details. Sam's blog entry also has a great overview of what's new in the release. You'll also notice that we updated Jivespace to 2.5, so you can trythe release here. We're doing final testing and will have the release bits available in the near future.

There's a lot in this release that's aimed at the developer crowd including many improvements to the plugin framework and a new theme resource kit for making easier changes to the UI. Check out the many new sections for developers in the Clearspace documentation. Also significant in the 2.5 release are big improvements to performance. Over the past several months, we've built out a performance test environment that's let us measure the many improvements we've been making to the code -- from a 15% improvement in some areas to over 700% in others. Overall, Clearspace 2.5 is at least a 200% faster than 2.0.

The Clearspace dev team is thrilled with the new release and we hope you'll be too. We're looking forward to your feedback!

Beta 4 Released

matt — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 00:37:48 GMT

We just released beta 4 of Clearspace 2.5.0. Changes since the last beta:

(CS-1690) Add more field checking to the profanity filter; tags Improvements
(CS-8007) bulletted lists and outdenting
(CS-5369]) Remove developer upgrade tasks
(CS-8191) Guests can read blog posts even when they are not allowed
(CS-8109) Tasks lists are broken due to anonymous user changes
(CS-8060) Due Date not displayed when importing/exporting project tasks with combined js resources enabled
(CS-8040) Removed "hide profile fields from guests" setting
(CS-8026) Recent content shows "by" the author rather than person who recently updated
(CS-7361) Removing attachment on edit of document when document requires approval causes system error.
(CS-6697) Documents get published in moderated spaces if the user saves a draft first and then publishes it

Many thanks for all the feedback so far and please continue to help us test the release!

Beta Program Launched

matt — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 19:22:58 GMT

We've just launched the public beta program for the next release of Clearspace. We'd love your help in making sure the code is as polished and bug-free as possible before the general release. This release is the third beta (after two private betas) of the 2.5 series. There are two ways to get involved: first, you can

download the release and install it on your own servers. You can also visit the beta sandbox site and create an account to test out a live instance and provide feedback. We're looking forward to hearing what you think!

Jive Acquires Jotlet

matt — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 03:10:24 GMT

I'm pleased to announce that Jive Software has acquired Jotlet. Jotlet has built some amazing calendar technology that we'll be incorporating into Clearspace in a future release. The two super-talented guys behind Jotlet are joining our team in Portland from Texas.

One key way Jotlet has innovated is by building a super-rich API that allows calendars to be easily embedded into any webpage. That's a big improvement over the Google Calendar approach, which requires an iFrame and doesn't offer a customizable UI. Over time we'll be applying similar concepts to all of the collaborative tools in Clearspace so that it's easy to bring the right social and collaborative features to wherever they're needed. Visit the Jotlet website for more details about their technology and to see it in action.

Millions of downloads for Openfire and the Ignite Realtime products

matt — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 23:28:38 GMT

We recently saw our Openfire downloads counter hit seven digits worth of downloads. The Openfire project is close to my heart and I first want to extend a sincere congratulations to my incredible team for developing the project into one that has hit 1 million downloads. Now the family of Ignite Realtime products have hit a collective download total of 3 million. The actual number of downloads is far greater because many of the Ignite products are now included in Linux distributions and are available for download from other sources. We are extremely pleased with the success of these projects and look forward to watching them grow more in the future.

I wanted to pull together numbers to provide some perspective for how significant these download numbers are. The only public number available for the other jabber servers was from ejabberd who is reporting around 160K downloads.

Openfire's ease of use and deep feature set is what's driving the downloads and installs. Here's how the Openfire features stack up vs. the others listed on jabber.org.

Products	No. of Features	No. of XEPs	No. of OSs Supported
Openfire	16	29	8
ejabberd	10	19	7
Jabber XCP	14	15	3
jabberd14	6	15	N/A
jabberd2	9	15	N/A
psyced	4	10	N/A
Tigase	7	21	8

Daniel posted about our milestone on the Ignite Realtime community, where one of our community members, Vchat20, had this to say:

Really you guys have a product that greatly stands out here. Granted, apps such as ejabberd for a flagship example have their place, but openfire is in its own class. Makes it TONS easier to configure a jabber system without having to bother digging into xml files and configuring everything from the ground up, has plenty of enterprise-class functionality, modular, and, of course, completely open.

Keep up the work on an awesome app guys.

Great work everybody and thank you to our Ignite Realtime community for all of your support! If you would like to play with our popular realtime communication software, you can download them here:

Openfire (beta of new version just released)
Spark
Smack
XIFF

XMPP (a.k.a. Jabber) is the future for cloud services

matt — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 18:00:50 GMT

There's a new firestorm brewing in web services architectures. Cloud services are being talked up as a fundamental shift in web architecture that promises to move us from interconnected silos to a collaborative network of services whose sum is greater than its parts. The problem is that the protocols powering current cloud services; SOAP and a few other assorted HTTP-based protocols are all one way information exchanges. Therefore cloud services aren't real-time, won't scale, and often can't clear the firewall. So, it's time we blow up those barriers and come to Jesus about the protocol that will fuel the SaaS models of tomorrow--that solution is XMPP (also called Jabber) . Never heard of it? In just a couple of years Google, Apple, AOL, IBM, Livejournal and Jive have all jumped on board. Sounds good, right? So, what's the hold up? Why aren't we building out cloud services with XMPP now? And, if people are already providing cloud services without XMPP, what's the motivation to switch? The rest of this post will shed some light on the current landscape and provide some answers to those questions.

Polling isn't working anymore

Since the beginning of the Internet, if you wanted to sync services between two servers the most common solution was to have the client ping the host at regular intervals, which his known as polling. Polling is how most of us check our email. We ping our email server every few minutes to see if we got new mail. It's also how nearly all web services APIs work.

Take, for example, Twitter. High Scalability recently covered the load stats on Twitter reporting that they average 200-300 connections per second with spikes that climb to 800 connections per second. Their MySQL server handles 2,400 requests per second! Recently, the Macworld keynote became the most recent culprit for causing Twitter to cut off its API, which has 10x the load of their website. While Twitter is not a cloud service, nor the largest demand service on the internet (with a paltry 350,000ish users, which pales in comparison to a MySpace or Yahoo!), they do illustrate the kind of frustration a user experiences with polling based services. And, that's just Twitter! Imagine the impact on overall Internet traffic congestion polling creates worldwide.

Interestingly, the recent Twitter outage lead some influencers, like Dave Winer, to suggest that Twitter move to XMPP which we've already begun experimenting with

Some companies are trying to address the polling problem with existing protocols. I think that move is largely motivated by a significant investment in legacy systems that makes moving to another protocol difficult. Salesforce is a perfect example of a company attempting to address the polling problem with creative applications of the old one way protocols.

The latest version of Salesforce will send notifications back to your own webservice to avoid polling. But, that's a pain to setup for developers. Worse, its very difficult to wire up reverse webservices calls through a corporate firewall.

The hold up

XMPP's largest hurdle is that its not HTTP, and common wisdom states everything new that's built must be web-based. That means we won't see a widespread application of XMPP in cloud services until a few more brave pioneers clear the path for the rest of us.

I've been heavily involved in the XMPP world as a developer of Smack (client library) and Openfire (server) and have also helped craft the standard as a member of the XMPP Standards Foundation. XMPP was invented for instant messaging and presence, and is the dominant open protocol in that space. Instant messaging? Yep, it turns out that all of the problems that had to be solved for instant messaging make the protocol perfect for cloud computing:

It allows for easy two-way communication, so bye bye polling. It even has rich pub-sub functionality built-in.
It's XML-based and easily extensible, perfect for both new instant messaging features and custom cloud services.
It's efficient and proven to scale to millions of concurrent users on a single service (such as Google's GTalk). It also has a built-in worldwide federation model.

I'm not the only one to notice that XMPP is a great fit for cloud computing. Tivo is switching to XMPP as a more efficient alternative to their old architecture:

<div class="jive-quote">Today each TiVo polls TiVo’s severs roughly every 15 minutes to check for new scheduled recordings, TiVoCast downloads, Unbox downloads, etc. That’s highly inefficient - nearly all of those polling calls are for nothing. There is nothing waiting to be done. And it introduces a lag when you want to start a download - up to 15 minutes. And it doesn’t scale well as TiVo’s user base keeps growing.

So what’s changed? The polling system is gone. TiVo is using XMPP now instead. (...) Yep, TiVo is basically using instant messaging for real- time communication. Now when the TiVo server has a new recording to schedule, it will IM the TiVo to tell it. Or if there is a download to pull, it will IM the TiVo to tell it to do so. This is a much more efficient system and it eliminates latency. It is really a clever idea.

</div>

Fixing the polling and scaling problems with XMPP as Tivo has done is compelling, but the built-in presence functionality also offers tantalizing possibilities. Presence includes basic availability information, but is extensible and can also include things like geo-location. Imagine cloud services taking different actions based on where the client is connecting from.

More people, us included, will make the shift to XMPP, which will provide the missing evidence to create momentum toward a tipping point. In fact, I'm happy to announce that Clearspace 2.0 will include a feature that's powered by an XMPP-based cloud service. We'll be publishing a series of blog entries in the near future to discuss how we built it.

Resources for XMPP cloud service developers

There are a few places you can turn for help building cloud services around XMPP. Here is a list of a few:

XMPP Standards Foundation -- where the standard gets defined
Ignite Realtime -- Jive Software's Open Source XMPP projects
Jabber Website -- lists XMPP servers, libraries and clients

Enterprise software can be sexy AND useful

matt — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 23:19:32 GMT

There was an interesting blogosphere battle this weekend over whether enterprise software should be "sexy". One camp says there's much to learn from the consumer space about focusing on the UI and ease of use. The other camp says there are more important fish to fry in the enterprise and that powering business processes is "sexy enough". One of my favorite links in the whole debate was to a jwz rant about how bad groupware is. Some snippets in his description of what went wrong in Netscape's evolution from a simple email client to an "enterprise" solution:

We had built this really nice entry-level mail reader in Netscape 2.0, and it was a smashing success. Our punishment for that success was that management saw this general-purpose mail reader and said, "since this mail reader is popular with normal people, we must now pimp it out to `The Enterprise', call it Groupware, and try to compete with Lotus Notes!" ...

Now the problem here is that the product's direction changed utterly. Our focus in the client group had always been to build products and features that people wanted to use. That we wanted to use. That our moms wanted to use.

"Groupware" is all about things like "workflow", which means, "the chairman of the committee has emailed me this checklist, and I'm done with item 3, so I want to check off item 3, so this document must be sent back to my supervisor to approve the fact that item 3 is changing from `unchecked' to `checked', and once he does that, it can be directed back to committee for review."

Nobody cares about that shit. Nobody you'd want to talk to, anyway. ...

If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.

When words like "groupware" and "enterprise" start getting tossed around, you're doing the latter. You start adding features to satisfy line-items on some checklist that was constructed by interminable committee meetings among bureaucrats, and you're coding toward an externally-dictated product specification that maybe some company will want to buy a hundred "seats" of, but that nobody will ever love. With that kind of motivation, nobody will ever find it sexy. It won't make anyone happy.There were probably lots of reasons that the Netscape releases failed, but losing focus on building software that people love had to be a major factor. Fast forward to an example from today -- have you ever met someone that actually likes using Sharepoint?

Another one of my favorite takes on this issue was Eddie Herrmann's discussion of the Enterprise Tyranny of the OR:

The enterprise question is not whether to choose between either process over people OR people over process. The answer is to be the genius that realizes that it can be both people AND process. Without this realization, you will see a change of heart in SAP's users of tomorrow that Dan talks about. If you leave people out of your priorities and omit them from your equation, they will find better tools to get their jobs done, even at the cost of your money saving, business process integration.Enterprise collaboration software has ignored the people part of collaboration for too long (which is pretty stupid isn't it?). In fact, it was an AND proposition that has made Clearspace 1.x so successful:

Its software that users love to use with features like wiki documents, blogs, and discussions, AND
It's software that works for the enterprise by combining all the next-gen tools in one product, providing integration with back-end systems, and by being available as on-premise software

Going forward, we're going to keep building out aggressively in both areas. But, it's people that have been most neglected by collaboration products in the past and we're out to prove there's a better way, which we illustrate with our positioning graph below. Look for an update from Bill next week with some hints about how Clearspace 2.0 will bring sexy back to enterprise software.

The Release Train

matt — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 21:18:48 GMT

Back in April, I blogged about how we were adopting a release train model for our Open Source projects. Since then, we've rolled out the same process to our commercial products Clearspace and Jive Forums. The release train is a fairly fundamental departure from how we've done releases in the past, so we wanted to provide more details about exactly how it works.

Why did we make a switch in how we build our software? There were many motivating factors, but the general theme is "move as fast as possible with high quality". For end users of our products, the key thing to know is that there will be a new release every three weeks. Each version contains bug fixes and new features and we're committed to maintaining high quality for every release (no more rushed bug fixes a week after a release). The graphic below illustrates how this process works:

Each release (from top to bottom of the graphic) takes a total of nine weeks: three weeks of planning, three weeks of development, and three weeks of QA. All three processes run in parallel, which leads to the three week release cycle.

Answers to common questions:

Q: Do we expect customers to upgrade every three weeks?

A: No, that's unreasonable in most environments. We've made it as easy to do upgrades as possible, and we hope you'll upgrade at least once per quarter to take advantage of all the great changes. When you do upgrade, the release train process will help ensure you're on high quality code.

Q: How will version numbers work?

A: Each release will get a minor version number: 1.5, 1.6., 1.7, etc. Major version numbers will change approximately once per year.

Q: How will you develop major new features that take more than three weeks?

A: Good question. No model is perfect and we're already working on new features that will take more than one train cycle to fully finish. In those cases, we're breaking the projects into milestones and using code branches as necessary.

Other Release Train Fun

The release train has had a deeper cultural impact than just being a way that we engineer our software. The marketing team now times a lot of their work on the train, and even our major happy hours are now on the three week cycle. Late afternoon of every third Friday, we gather the company for a demo of the new features and then adjourn for partying.

Time will tell how well this new process works, but we're excited about it and the results so far are promising.

Enterprise 2.0 Conference

matt — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 17:05:09 GMT

![http://www.igniterealtime.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/ent_2_0.gif!Greg] and I were in Boston this week for the Enterprise 2.0 conference. We had a good set of meetings and lots of interesting discussions at the Jive booth. There were some consistent themes to the conversations:

Everyone is interested to see how large deployments of Enterprise 2.0 software will play out. Are cultural changes needed at large companies? When does IT get involved? What metrics will companies use to measure the success of these roll-outs?
A point-solution approach to Enterprise 2.0 doesn't cut it. Social software like wikis, blogs and discussions are meant to break down silos inside companies by eliminating inefficient email exchanges and by giving everyone a voice. But deploying products with narrow sets of functionality just ends up creating a whole new set of silos -- this time around content types. We've heard from people in companies that have gone with the point solution approach that they have go to one wiki instance for one set of information, the blogging engine for other info, and another wiki instance when they want updates about what another team in the company is up to, etc. None of it can be accessed by a single search, and every system has it's own version of social features like tagging and user profiles. One company we've talked to has literally three hundred different wiki instances. Trying to integrate these systems together is expensive and complicated.
Sharepoint is glorified file sharing and pretty universally despised. However, it's still being deployed very widely.
Clearspace is compelling: the fact that it delivers a unified suite of functionality (discussions, wiki documents and blogging) that's easy to use by both users and administrators is a very strong message. That said, getting the word out that Clearspace is even an option is still a challenge since we're a small company. This was especially true in my talks with analysts at the show.
We (Jive) can't boil the ocean and take on every possible feature ourselves. Showing how Clearspace is already able to integrate with existing systems inside companies is important in almost all the conversations we have. We'll need to continue to demonstrate meaningful partnerships with other vendors. A number of people have told us they'd love Clearspace to be able to vacuum up their existing wikis.

Overall, the show reinforced the fact that it's an exciting time for the Enterprise 2.0 space. Companies are moving beyond pilot deployments and are trying to figure out how to make this software practical across their entire user base. I've pretty excited about the role Clearspace will play in that process given everything above.

Having Fun in Clearspace

matt — Thu, 24 May 2007 21:28:26 GMT

It's been pretty amazing to see how our own Clearspace deployment inside Jive Software has improved communication and helped us get work done faster. We're all Clearspace addicts, and as such, some of our fun has moved there. A few examples:

Somehow, a mustache growing contest took off inside the company. Several blog entries with pictures made it into the "Water Cooler" space, including an embarrassing attempt by me. The clear winner was Todd (who will not be pleased about me posting his winning entry).
There are lots of avid runners at Jive and group runs and races are all getting discussed through Clearspace.
Erskine's personal blog entry about his nerd score (59) attracted a huge number of comments from all over the company. Others' scores ranged from 6 to a perfect 100.
Everyone controls their own avatars. The ability to inject a bit of personality into Clearspace has proven to be a major incentive to participate.
!http://www.igniterealtime.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/avatars.gif!

We even added a Youtube macro to Clearspace recently, which makes it easier to share the occasional fun video.

What's New at Ignite

matt — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 15:28:09 GMT

A lot has been happening in our Open Source community, igniterealtime.org over the past two months. In case you're not reading the Ignite blog or forums regularly, some highlights:

Openfire 3.3.0, Spark 2.5.1 and Smack 3.0.1 are the latest product releases. In particular, we've continued to polish the VoIP support in the products. We're also experimenting with a release train development process for Spark that may soon be applied to all Jive software product development.
Lots of interesting work is being done with Flash audio and video support via XMPP.
We're preparing a new beta of SparkWeb, our pure HTML/AJAX instant messaging client, which is part of Openfire Enterprise. A final release is due in the near future.
The IM Gateway plugin for Openfire is out of beta with the official 1.0 release. It provides connectivity to AIM, ICQ, Yahoo and MSN.
Asterisk-IM development has been kick-started by community members, lead by Stefan Reuter. Asterisk-IM is an Openfire plugin that provides integration with the Asterisk PBX, such as automatic "on the phone" presence updates.

Upcoming Conferences

matt — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 19:29:49 GMT

We're at several conferences next week:

VON, March 20-22: Greg and I will be staked out at Booth &nb sp; 1641. Stop by to see the the latest VoIP (Jingle and SIP) work we're doing at Jive.
WebVentures, March 21: Dave will be giving a talk about Enterprise 2.0, including Clearspace and Openfire.
Under the Radar<span class="jive-link-wiki">* , March 23: Sam will be giving a demo of Clearspace, including some never before seen features.

It's a busy schedule, but we love getting the word out!

IM Usage at Jive

matt — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 01:30:06 GMT

Just for fun, I ran a usage report on our Wildfire server over the weekend. Using the archiving feature in Wildfire Enterprise, I logged how many conversations each Jive employee has participated in since we turned on stats tracking at the end of May last year. We use the light-weight archiving mode, which only records metadata about each conversation and not the actual messages being sent back and forth. Organizations subject to compliance requirements can also turn on full message archiving.

A conversation is defined as the string of messages sent back and forth without a significant time gap (15 minutes by default). The top ten users are as follows:

Name	Conversation Count
Matt T	8,198
Megan R	6,038
Derek D	5,676
Bill L	5,433
Kerry L	4,898
Sarah D	4,613
Sam L	4,488
Kelly P	4,242
Greg U	3,687
Scott C	3,661

Yes, I'm totally addicted to IM, with an average of about 47 conversations every business day. The rest of the company isn't far behind, with almost everyone else not in the top ten falling between two to three thousand conversations. It represents a staggering amount of email that we didn't have to send, as we've found that each IM conversation can represent several emails (getting a question answered over email can take several messages back and forth). That also means we've saved a lot of time, which means we've all worked more efficiently. We already think "email is the new snail mail" here at Jive. How does your company use IM?

Plugin Support, Finally

matt — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 17:21:52 GMT

Now that we've added support for plugins to Clearspace and the next version of Jive Forums, it's hard to believe it took us so long to add such a useful and powerful feature. The basic idea behind plugins is to dynamically extend the functionality of the application without having to modify the core source code. For example, our professional services team will use plugins to build custom functionality for clients that is easily portable between different product releases. Plugins will also be used to deliver features that are only useful to a portion of our customers, like Salesforce integration.

Plugins have been very successful in Wildfire and our friends from Atlassian has tons of cool plugins in their products. We borrowed a lot of ideas from Wildfire plugins (see the developer guide) in order to create the system in Clearspace and Jive Forums. Of course there are some unique twists as well. For example, if you install a plugin on one node of a Clearspace cluster, the plugin will get automatically pushed to all the other nodes. Developers will also appreciate the fact that plugins can easily override any page or action in the application, which makes some very deep customizations quite easy. Plugins are installed and managed from the admin console:

[developer guide|http://jivesoftware.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2006/12/pluginadmin.png|pluginad min.png]

For the launch of Clearspace, we wanted a plugin that would be a great example of what the framework allows. So, we created the WebDAV plugin. WebDAV is a useful protocol for publishing and accessing documents. For example, you can access content through WebDAV using Windows Explorer or OS X (just like a shared drive):

[WebDAV|http://jivesoftware.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2006/12/clearspace-web-view.png| clearspace-web-view.png] [WebDAV|http://jivesoftware.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2006/12/clearspace-webdav-view.p ng|clearspace-webdav-view.png]

For now, the WebDAVplugin provides read-only access to the latest version of documents. In a future version, we'll add write support as well. I'm really looking forward to all the interesting plugins that our engineering team and community members put together!

Jivesoftware.org is now Igniterealtime.org

matt — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 19:17:31 GMT

We just launched a new home for jivesoftware.org: igniterealtime.org. The new site has an improved UI, community blog, and better content. Why the change?

Having jivesoftware.org along with jivesoftware.com was simply confusing. The new site helps us articulate the Open Source business model more clearly and is a better home for the community.
We've been growing a lot lately -- from feature set, to community involvement, to download numbers. Both Wildfire and Spark are moving beyond the "awkward teenager" phase and ignite realtime helps us spread that message.

As always, launching a new site is way more work than one would expect and many people helped out. However, I'd like to specifically thank Contegix. They host all Jive websites and generously sponsor hosting of igniterealtime.org. Their professionalism and expert help were appreciated at 1:00 am last night as we put on the finishing site touches.

Please check out the site and let us know what you think!