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!

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!

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!

In 2.0.6 and 2.5.0 the UserService deleteUser method is going away. This is due to a transaction issue in the core UserManager#deleteUser method. The UserManager#deleteUser method is also disabled in these versions because of this.

In the web service we opted to remove the method, rather than have the WSDL reflect a method that would only throw an Exception.

The method will once again return in a future version. In the meantime we recommend using the UserService disableUser operation instead as this will prevent the user from contributing any new content.

In my previous blog posts I talked about Connecting a chat client to Clearspace and Scheduling chats in Clearspace. Today we are going to explain another usage of Chat inside of Clearspace.

Lets say that we create a new social group that can be seen by anyone and anyone can join the group. As described in Connecting a chat client to Clearspace, I can use my XMPP client to log into Openfire using my Clearspace credentials. I will then see in my roster (aka contacts list) the newly created social group and its members. From there I can easily tell if they are available, away, unavailable, etc. If I want I can start a one-to-one conversation or even send messages to offline users knowing that they will get them when they come back online.

A room in Openfire was created when we created the social group in Clearspace. Rooms are also created when you create new spaces or projects. So what are these rooms? These rooms are defined by XEP-0045: Multi-User Chat and will exist as long as the social group, space or project exists. When someone tries to join the room, Openfire will ask Clearspace if that user is allowed to join the room. Clearspace will check the user permissions on the social group, space or project to answer that question.

Most XMPP clients allow you to browse rooms on the server. This is a very convenient way for users to discover rooms and join them. As we said, Clearspace has the ultimate control on who can join which room. Once in the room, everything that is said and information about users that join and left the room is stored in Clearspace. The chat transcript and presence information is updated every minute in Clearspace. It is also immediately available for searches.

Besides being able to join from your XMPP client of choice you will also have the choice to join the room from the Clearspace site. When you go to the page of the social group, project or space you can customize it to have a widget that will show the room activity (without actually joining the room). Users can then click the join button to actually join the room and participate from the widget. Beside the widget option we also provide other ways to join the room from your site.

Moreover, just like you can do in youtube.com it is also possible to copy some HTML instructions to embed the chat widget in your site outside of Clearspace. You can even pass the user/password from your site to the embedded widget so that the user does not need to log in again. However, if no user/password was passed then the widget will ask the user for his credentials before joining the room.