In addition to having a steller line up of customer presenters at JiveWorld, we also launched our 1st annual Jive SBS Awards.

Six customers were called out for their outstanding efforts in exemplifying the business outcomes that Social Business Software can generate during a main stage presentation at the event.

Checkout the winner highlights.

Business Impact – United Business Media, a global media company with brands such as PRNewswire and TechWeb, was selected for its community deployment of Jive SBS, and its role in the strategic vision of the company. UBM’s community is not simply an “after thought" for the organization, but has the support and attention of the company’s senior leadership. Within the first year of deployment, its community has grown to over 5,000 users, working in 35 countries; users have created around 25,000 pages and generated around 3 million page views and the results: greater efficiencies, cost reductions and revenue increases to the organization.

   UBM and Jivers presenting the award -- more photos coming to the JiveWorld community shortly

User Experience - NIKE, Inc. was selected for its innovative use of Jive to better connect its global network of marketers with the digital assets they need to drive the brand forward. Although NIKE has a sophisticated Content Management System (CMS) in place, it was difficult to navigate for marketers who weren't yet trained on the CMS application. By using Jive as a social layer above the CMS, NIKE marketers around the world can quickly access and share approved media assets in a single location.

Community Innovation – The National Journal Group, the leading source of non partisan reporting on the current political environment and emerging policy trends, was selected for its ground breaking 3121 platform, powered by Jive.  3121 is the first professional networking tool designed exclusively for members of congress and their senior staff, federal agency executives and government affairs professionals.

Community Adoption – CSC, a global leader in  providing technology-enabled solutions and services, was selected for the launch of its internal community "C3: Connect. Communicate. Collaborate."  Through the  tenacity, credibility and trustworthiness of those involved, the CSC team  secured a phenomenal level of executive endorsement from the onset and  established a clear linkage between its "enterprise 2.0" initiatives to the  company’s core business strategic objectives. Through enabling a strong global  advocate network and allowing collaboration patterns to emerge, C3 enjoyed viral  success in only 20 weeks, achieving 25,000 registered users, over 2000 new  groups and generating over 1 million page views a month.

Social Business Software Champion(s) – Two winners were selected in this category: Kaiser Permanente and Swiss Re.

• Kaiser Permanente's IdeaBook, powered by Jive, is an internal online community aimed at capitalizing on the strength of its 165,000 employees and 14,000  physicians by facilitating knowledge sharing and increasing collaboration  and productivity. IdeaBook's rising adoption among employees -- it's  adding more than 2,000 users per month -- has been made possible by the efforts of a dedicated and thoughtful communication and technology planning  team, key leader participation and advocacy efforts such as real life case studies and user anecdotes.
• Swiss Re operates  in more than 20 countries and provides its expertise and services as an  reinsurer for property and casualty as well as life and health business. Traditional reinsurance products are complemented by insurance-based corporate finance solutions.  Swiss Re took a community centric  approach to collaboration and provided a business platform for virtual  teams, expert networks, projects, learning groups and other communities. More than 10,000 employees got access to the tool and within two weeks after the launch, more than 130 new groups were created.

(You can also read the official press release.)

SBS 4.0 is all about closing the gap between the way business tools MAKE people work and the way we WANT to work. And let’s face it, most of us work within Microsoft Office.  Jive recently announced a new content management strategy with Microsoft SharePoint integration as a first step. But for SBS to be adopted broadly in enterprises, that social layer has to reach not only across content silos, but also to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and the like. So we’re going the next step to integrate with Microsoft Office to help its 600 million users be more social.

As part of the 4.0 announcement this morning, we introduced the Jive Connects for Microsoft Office. This a simple plug-in that allows multiple authors and contributors to make comments and changes on an Office file simultaneously with automatic synchronization of each other's changes. When users create and save Office content, it gets published in their Jive activity stream, which invites comments, discussions, and constructive feedback. Before, users would have to upload the file to Jive then individually download it. With the plug-in, that synchronization to Jive occurs directly from Office.

This eliminates two classic headaches:

• Version control: one user can work on the graphics of a PowerPoint presentation while another is working on the script and see changes in the file as they happen. Confusion is eliminated because there is only one synchronized version of a document available to users, which also ensures that everyone is working from the same content.
• Reply All as your collaboration tool: it eliminates reliance on email to share and review content by providing a unique Jive URL for every saved document that can be accessed by any user with appropriate access. In fact, non-Office users can preview and provide inline comments to any Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint file as well as any PDF.

So for all of us who live in Microsoft Office, things just got a whole lot better.

I'd also like to thank our partner DocVerse who helps power this solution.  You can read more at Shan Sinha's blog, DocVerse's CEO.

With the magnitude of the Jive SBS 4.0 release, jive bloggers decided to team up on the news and split it into digestible pieces. In this series of posts, we delve deep into the new mobile tools, bridging public and private realms together, deep Microsoft Office integration, and provide a high level perspective of Jive SBS 4.0.

Dave Hersh on Jive SBS 4.0

David Greenberg on Jive Bridging

Hello, Jivespace users and viewers!

Jive SBS 4.0 is generating quite a bit of buzz out in the marketplace, as well as here in Support.  We are excited about the new features we'll be taking advantage of when we upgrade, including some additional features and functionality in our Supportal customization.  Please read on to find out what is coming up in about a month!

First, the Vision

Jivespace started out with a focus on technical conversations and customer support.  Looking ahead, the vision for Jivespace is broadening to be a more connected communication ecosystem for technical and business people from the Jive team, customers, prospective customers, and partners.  The first step of this vision has already occurred (Oct. 3) by establishing a Business Conversations space and merging into that space all the content and conversations from a Jive community previously called Clearstep.  Many Jivespace members were also members of Clearstep, and, as just one example of the benefits to members, they now only have to worry about 1 set of login credentials.

With the upgrade to 4.0 in the near future, there are many additional features that will significantly help bring this vision to life.  Many of these new features are highlighted further below.  However, more than just new features, Jive is thinking about this community in a much more holistic way, and we are dedicated to making it a showcase of how businesses need to be operating by breaking down all the silos both within and outside a company's four walls.

Changes to the Supportal

Transition to Social Groups

We are making a big change when upgrading to 4.0: moving customers from spaces to social groups!  As we continue to evolve our support spaces, we have added additional functionality for membership.  One of the biggest advantages to moving to social groups is that we get membership for free!  We had been duplicating membership functionality, which, when looking at it from a higher level, really didn't make sense!  Social group are another way to align with our vision for Jivespace.

Cases and discussions

Both discussions and support cases will coexist in your customer group.  This lets you easily engage with other groups at Jive Software without having to wonder, "Where should this go?  It's not a support case."

Improved Severity 1 handling

We continually refine our support for major customer issues and have three changes in this release which help get us to the next level.

Severity 1 cases are now re-pageable

When a Severity 1 case is submitted by a customer with Premium Support, our on-call engineer is paged.  Once the on-call engineer acknowledges this page, no additional pages will be sent. Typically this is just what we want: an alert to get our attention for a S1 issue.  However, there are times where an on-call engineer asks for additional information or has an otherwise lengthy wait for a customer response.  During business hours this isn't a big deal, but off hours, in the middle of the night, it can be a burden.

To resolve this we've made S1 issues re-pagable.  When the S1 issue switches status to 'Waiting on Jive' during off hours, a new round of pages will be sent out.  This allows us the freedom to catch a few winks or otherwise step away from the computer while waiting for a response.  This will also help us increase our responsiveness to customers, as we'll be alerted immediately when the status of the case changes.

Integrated RCA cases (Root Cause Analysis)

Traditionally, Support has created separate Root Cause Analysis (RCA) cases for S1 issues upon request.  This was usually an ad-hoc exercise for sharing our findings.  Moving forward we'd like to solidify this process. To improve this practice we've implemented a 'Create RCA Case' feature available to our Support Engineers.  With one click, an Engineer can create a case based on a defined RCA template.  When doing so, we automatically link the S1 issue case to the RCA case for increased visibility and navigation.  Making it easy to create RCA cases will drive us to create RCAs for S1s at a higher rate than ever before, which in turn will help us ensure we are either prepared for this issue next time, or--better yet--stop it all together.  With increased visibility to RCA cases for our customers as well as the Support Engineers, resolution time for repeat issues should be dramatically reduced.

Automatic and Proactive follow-ups on Severity 1 issues

Severity 1 issues were not seeing the love they deserved.  We care as much about closing-out customer-reported S1 issues as you do, and with a new proactive follow-up tool in place, any S1 cases that become inactive for a couple days will send a friendly reminder to both the customer and the assigned Support Engineer.  Alternatives are to 1) decrease the severity of your case when it is no longer a Severity1 issue, or 2)  use the previously mentioned RCA ability to close out S1 issues quickly and effectively!

Upgrading to 4.0 = New features!

Without a doubt, 4.0 is Jive's biggest release ever, and we plan to leverage every applicable aspect for our public-facing communities.  In the Support area we're especially excited to use the new bridging capability with our internal community which will allow for more streamlined communication between our Support and Engineering teams.

A brief highlight of some of the new Jive elements you won't see on Jivespace but you should definitely learn about are Jive Market Engagement, our SharePoint Connector, new mobile elements (that we can't talk much about until the actual launch in a few days), and new reporting capabilities.

Thank you,

Will French, Support Manager

Adam Mertz, Product Marketing Manager

Today at Gartner Symposium the Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace was unveiled, and I feel privileged to share that Jive Software was positioned in the Leaders quadrant. In today's business world the Gartner Magic Quadrant is arguably the most recognized and respected qualitative assessment of a market and its participants. This recognition is particularly meaningful because of the diligence with which Gartner selects leaders by focusing on maturity of offerings, and the vision necessary to continue to lead a market. The process is exhaustingly thorough and involves hundreds of customer conversations, which is why companies across the world rely on Gartner's guidance for selecting vendors.  It is without a doubt a privilege and an honor to be recognized in this way.

I'd like to take this opportunity to do three things. The first is to express sincere appreciation to the hundreds of companies who had the vision and foresight to recognize the potential for what Jive Social Business Software could mean to their companies. Enterprises like Kaiser Permanente, United Business Media, Yum!, and Manheim invested in Jive early on and have played an integral part in shaping the direction of our products. They are helping us realize a vision of transforming the way customers, partners, and employees connect with each other to achieve unprecedented results for their businesses.

The second is to pause and reflect on what an amazing moment in time this is for Jive as a company.  In what was one of the worst economies in recent history we just wrapped up our 4^th consecutive quarter of record revenues with 100% year over year growth in Q3.  We closed a second round of investment from Sequoia Capital who has an unmatched track record of identifying successful technology companies that transform the way we live and work.  We are approaching our inaugural users' conference, JiveWorld, that in a year of the non-conference and the un-conference, sold out far in advance and has an incredible line-up of customers speaking about their success.  And, we are releasing Jive SBS 4.0 which is easily the largest, most impactful release in our company's history.

And lastly, I would like to reaffirm our commitment to our customers. Being recognized as a leader is an honor, but I know I speak for every Jiver when I say that it just increases the belief, determination, and commitment we bring to work every day.  Thank you for helping us grow to this stage and allowing us to do what we love.  See you next week at JiveWorld!

(UPDATE: You can now get a complimentary copy of the MQ Report on our Analyst Coverage page)

As all Jive Forums customers already know, last summer Jive announced the planned end of life of the JIve Forums product. Well, it is now a year later and the end of life is upon us. As a reminder, as of October 1, 2009, Jive Software discontinues support and development for Jive Forums. We at Jive are grateful for all of our Forums business over the years and encourage any customers still running Forums to learn more about our industry leading offering, Jive Social Business Software. If you have any questions related to your current Jive Forums deployment and how this may impact you please contact Jive Support, or your account manager.

At this point, even my dad has asked me what I think about Google Wave (sorry Dad for any tech-savvy intimations!). Since Wave is in the process of rolling out to a much larger audience of testers and developers, it seemed like an appropriate time to jot down some thoughts about it. But first, an announcement: as widely discussed around the web, Wave uses the XMPP protocol under the hood and in particular works with the Openfire XMPP server (see Wave Federation install docs). Openfire was developed by Jive and we continue to sponsor it as an Open Source project. Up to this point, Openfire has been available under the GPL license. We've moved Openfire to the more liberal Apache 2.0 Open Source license, which is the same license used for the Google Wave Federation project. This change is already reflected in the Openfire source tree and an official release will be made soon. We hope and believe that the more liberal Apache 2.0 license will help unleash a new wave of innovation around Openfire (bad pun gleefully intended).

So, Wave itself -- though the project is still in the early stages (and far from ready for prime-time, especially in an enterprise setting) it's generated an enormous amount of buzz. No doubt a large part of that excitement is due to it being from Google. But more importantly, Wave is pushing the boundaries of what's possible in a web browser with a super rich and real-time user experience. It serves as inspiration to all of us that develop collaboration software. While it's still a bit early for Jive to have an official position on Wave, we're definitely following it closely and the Wave concepts align well with our roadmap. So much has been written about Wave already that I won't attempt to duplicate any of the existing detailed overviews. But I do have my personal three favorite things about Wave:

1. Wave will help drive adoption of HTML 5 by serving as such a compelling example of what that technology makes possible.
2. Wave uses XMPP as the back-end protocol. Yes, I'm a nerd for loving a protocol.
3. Federation is baked-in. This was a visionary move by Google and big win for an open internet in the new world of monolithic web sites/services.

It will be fun to watch where all of this goes.