Jive SBS Syndication Feed

Planting Bigger Roots in the Bay Area and Looking for a Few Good Jivers

matt@jivesoftware.com — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 23:37:02 GMT

I’ve never been so happy to unpack boxes. That’s just one of the memorable scenes happening at Jive’s brand new Bay Area home at 735 Emerson in downtown Palo Alto. We moved into this great space (which formerly housed Ning) after outgrowing our first Palo Alto space in only five months. Those of us in that first “Jive South” office quickly learned how to optimize space on a weekly basis as more and more employees joined. But now we feel like we have a great home that gives us plenty of room to grow as we expand our Silicon Valley team.

The other scene unfolding are the final touches for tonight’s Open House event to celebrate our new digs. If you are in the area, come join us tonight (November 19) from 4-7pm for some food and drinks. A good number of the Jive engineering team will be joining me to honor their efforts in launching Jive SBS 4.0 last month – the biggest bundle of innovation in our company’s history. Please RSVP to events@jivesoftware.com so we get you on the list.

Another major reason for the Open House -- Jive is aggressively hiring product management and engineering positions to help with our expansion efforts. It’s no secret that the Bay Area is a cradle of incredible tech talent, and we’d like to meet more of you and share the excitement of what it’s like to lead the Social Business Software revolution. The Open House is a great place to get familiar with the team and hear about what we’ve done and where we’re going.

Cisco Helps Jive Spread the Social Religion

matt@jivesoftware.com — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:06:44 GMT

I've seen quite a bit of buzz about Cisco's social software announcement yesterday. Honestly, Jive is excited to see Cisco entering the social software market. For years, Cisco has used Jive Social Business Software (SBS) for its customer and partner facing communities. In fact, the yesterday's launch of the Enterprise Collaboration Platform was managed via a community built on Jive SBS.

Jive shares Cisco's vision of unified communication and collaboration eventually merging, and we both believe social software will be central to this shift. The difference is the approach, as Tony Bates, SVP of Cisco, said in yesterday's Wall Street Journal. Cisco will continue to be the leader in communications plumbing, using social software to integrate its set of communications tools including WebEx, Jabber, and Telephony. Meanwhile, Jive will continue to focus on engaging employees, partners, customers, and prospects where and how they work, with Jive's SBS platform co-existing with collaboration and content systems from Cisco, Microsoft, and others.

We will be watching Cisco's developments closely as they start rolling out products mid-next year. And just as Google Wave is helping to push the envelope, Jive welcomes the contributions from the biggest technology players to help enterprises deliver on the goals of Social Business Software.

XMPP and Web Progress: Google Wave

matt@jivesoftware.com — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 09:27:12 GMT

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:

Wave will help drive adoption of HTML 5 by serving as such a compelling example of what that technology makes possible.
Wave uses XMPP as the back-end protocol. Yes, I'm a nerd for loving a protocol.
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.

Can Jive Help Make the Internet Better?

matt@jivesoftware.com — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 21:58:27 GMT

In a bid to make the internet a better place for web developers, there's been a big effort lately to kill IE 6. My favorite part of the story is Microsoft themselves, with a promise to donate food on behalf of people that upgrade from IE6 to IE8:

Our UI team regularly curses the large set of workarounds and compromises that IE6 support forces on them. Such is the reality of being an enterprise software vendor -- we still have many customers using the browser as a corporate standard (and believe it or not, there are some real reasons to delay the upgrade due to the expense of re-writing internal webapps that were specifically targeted at IE6).

On the other hand, I talk to plenty of customers and prospects that are clamoring for us to keep pushing the boundary of what's possible with social software in a web browser, especially after they've seen and tested Google Wave. Dropping IE6 will let us develop richer features faster and with less bugs. We're already committed to supporting it in our next release, but here's my question: should Jive drop official IE6 support in our release after next? No promises on timing of that release of course, but we're likely talking about late next Spring. We'll be conducting a more official survey, but your non-scientific opinion counts too! Leave a blog comment or tweet me @matttucker. And, cheers to a better internet for everyone.

JiveWorld 09 -- Technical Track Call for Speakers

matt@jivesoftware.com — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 22:27:36 GMT

The inaugural JiveWorld conference in October will include a technical track that will be chock-full of valuable content. I'm putting together the agenda for the track and am looking forward to starting to share details in the weeks ahead. But in order to make this conference great, we need your help. Are you the Jive technical guru at your organization? If so, we want you to participate in the tech track of the conference by becoming a speaker.

The conference will be a fantastic place to share tips and tricks as well as to learn how to get the most from the Jive platform. Interested in being a speaker but not sure about a topic? How about performance optimization tips or stories? Or, share details of the Jive customizations you've done. I'm looking forward to reading through your topic ideas and see you in October!

Jive at Engineering Events

matt@jivesoftware.com — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 22:00:44 GMT

We've been participating in and sponsoring several great engineering events in both Portland and the Bay Area that I wanted to highlight:

Recent Events

Portland JavaScript Admirers, June 24 -- a group of smart Javascript hackers that meets monthly to discuss cutting-edge Javascript techniques. We provided beer and pizza and look forward to participating in the future meetups.

Portland Cloud Camp, June 30 -- Portland's own iteration of the popular CloudCamp unconference series, which Jive sponsored. There were lots of great discussions and it's super relevant content for Jive given our expanding investment in cloud computing and specifically Amazon AWS. I also enjoyed attending the San Francisco CloudCamp on June 24.

Upcoming Events

CHIFOO, July 8 -- the Computer-Human Interaction Forum Of Oregon hosts monthly meetings at Jive's offices to discuss user experience, usability and interaction design.

Refresh Portland, July 23 -- a monthly event for designers interested in refreshing the creative, technical, and professional culture in the Portland area that's hosted at the Jive office.

We're adding more events to our calendar and are always interested in helping technical organizations in either Portland or the Bay Area with location space (or beer sponsorship!)

Jive's Bay Area Office

matt@jivesoftware.com — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 14:06:39 GMT

I'm pleased to report that Jive's Bay Area office is officially open! We're still getting unpacked and the office is definitely still un-finished (note the ugly cubes that were already there). But the Palo Alto location already feels like Jive and is going to be a great place to work. Some of the good and/or interesting highlights so far:

Explaining to people that there is in fact commercial space in the Town & Country center (and it's even nice)
Occasionally not being able to tell the difference between Paly High and Stanford students while at Pete's
The same snacks as the Portland office (including Red Bull and beer) -- definitely helps with the late-night coding sessions
The office "running club", which consists of me and Angela until we can hire more people that like running.

Why Palo Alto?

We're expanding our engineering team and looking for great people in the Bay (and Portland!). If you're passionate about social software and building incredible products for the world's biggest companies then we hope you'll reach out. You'll be joining the growing group in Palo Alto and the larger Jive team that's leading the social business software revolution. Please check out the job reqs for application information or drop me an email or DM.

Enterprise Cloud Computing: Announcing Jive Express

matt@jivesoftware.com — Mon, 04 May 2009 05:03:57 GMT

Today we launched Jive Express, a cloud service that lets enterprise business users get up and running with social business software within minutes. The cost is $3 a user/month and we're making the first three months or 100 users free for qualified companies. Departments and cross-company teams have never had such easy access to a collaborative social software product this powerful. It's the same incredibly rich platform that underlies our Jive SBS product along with features specifically targeted for teams like the success dashboard pictured at right. (Want to know how Jive Express stacks up to our full-blown Jive SBS platform? See the quick matrix). Other than being jazzed about the product and the fact that I got to be on the team at Jive that built it, I'm also excited about our first foray into cloud computing and the strategy we're building around it.

How is Jive approaching the cloud? We believe large organizations will embrace the cloud but that it will be a multi-year process. We want to be there to help with the transition in a pragmatic, realistic way. In the short-term, that means making it easy to transistion on and off the cloud using our single tenant architecture (see my last blog for more on single tenant cloud apps). We've used virtualization to drive amazing levels of cost efficiency while providing maximum security and data isolation. We know that enterprise companies are still in the intial stages of cloud adoption, so we're making it very easy to start there but then move to on-premise or to our more traditional hosted environment as the implementation scales. This hybrid approach is unique and we believe it's the best approach for enterprise cloud adoption. To implement all of this, we chose Amazon's AWS service as the backend cloud provider. Working with them has been a fantastic experience so far and they seem to be well on their way to solving many of the enterprise cloud concerns around security and compliance.

I plan to blog a lot more details about how we built the Jive Express service as well as our ongoing cloud ventures in the future. Also check out my interview with whurley at Infoworld for more details. In the meantime, be sure to check out the Jive Express site and signup.

Can single-tenant work for enterprise SaaS?

matt@jivesoftware.com — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 22:38:26 GMT

I spend a lot of time working on Jive's enterprise SaaS offerings. There's one question in particular we've invested quite a bit of engineering time in answering recently -- is it possible to leverage the cloud to build a scalable SaaS solution using a single tenant architecture? It's not so long ago that it felt embarrassing to say the words "Saas" and " single-tenant" in the same sentence. For years, it's been an industry mantra that it's simply impossible to have a scalable Saas business without multi-tenancy. But recent technology advances have eroded the multi-tenant advantage. And especially for the enterprise, there are important reasons why single-tenancy can actually be a better solution. I don't intend to start a flame-war over which approach is ultimately better, but I offer the top reasons my single-tenant shame is passing:

Cloud computing is changing the game. Cloud computing is anchored on virtuatlization and new levels of automation via api-based resource allocation. It's now possible to approach multi-tenant level cost efficiency with a single-tenant application. Although the cloud isn't ready for all Enterprise use-cases (due to security and compliance concerns), cloud computing is maturing very quickly.
Data isolation. Most multi-tenant applications use a single database to store all customer data. That means application bugs can put your data at risk by making it visible to other companies in the same SaaS environment. We use a separate database for each customer in addition to all the advanced data security features baked into the product, which provides much better isolation for critical data.
Migration. SaaS offers fast setup and a fantastic TCO. But current enterprise security and compliance polices around storing corporate data in the cloud can be too high of a hurdle to overcome as product usage expands from a single department to the whole organization. Because of our single-tenant architecture, we're able to offer the same product via SaaS or on-premise. Plus we make it really easy to move from one environment to the other. We believe it's the pragmatic approach, and the one best suited for enterprise.
Customization. One of our key selling points for public-facing communities is the ability to closely match an existing site's look and feel. Most multi-tenant applications end up looking cookie-cutter with just a few color changes. Jive offers much deeper levels of flexibility.

In an upcoming blog entry, I'll share further details about how we're leveraging the cloud including how we're using XMPP.

Platform Support in Clearspace 2.5

matt@jivesoftware.com — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 17:16:12 GMT

There's been some confusion (and not enough communication from us) about platform support for Clearspace 2.5, so I wanted to post details about how it all works. In order to focus QA efforts we're phasing in support for additional application servers and databases throughout the 2.5.x release cycle. The most critical thing to know is that you shouldn't attempt to upgrade to 2.5.x until your environment is supported. Or even better, consider migrating to our recommended platform configuration (see below).

The table below represents our current roadmap for platform support (the release column indicates where a particular platform is first supported). As with any roadmap, it's subject to changes based on shifting demands or unexpected issues:

Release	Application Servers	Databases	OS	Java Release
2.5.0	Tomcat 6	MySQL, Postgres	Linux	Sun JDK 1.6
2.5.1 (Sept 8)		Oracle 10 & 11
2.5.2 (Sept 29)	JBoss 4, WebSphere 6.1			IBM JDK 1.6
2.5.3 (Oct 20)	Weblogic 9.2	MS SQL Server 2005
2.5.4 (Nov 17)		IBM DB2	Windows Server 2003	IBM JDK 1.5
2.5.5 (Dec 15)			Solaris 10	Sun JDK 1.5

The breakdown of recommended and supported platforms for the 2.5.x release cycle:

	OS	JDK	Appserver	Database
Recommended	Linux (2.6 Kernel)	Sun Java 6 (Latest JDK 1.6)	Apache Tomcat 6.0.10 (or later in 6.0.x series)	Postgres 8.x
Supported	Windows Server 2003 SP2 Linux (2.6 Kernel) Solaris 10	Sun Java 6 (JDK 1.6) IBM Java 6 (JDK 1.6) Sun Java 5 (JDK 1.5) IBM Java 5 (JDK 1.5)	Apache Tomcat 6.0.10 (or later) IBM Websphere 6.1, Fixpack 11+ BEA Weblogic 9.2 JBoss 4.0.x, 4.2.x, or 4.3.x	MySQL 5.x Oracle 11.x Postgres 8.x Oracle 10.x IBM DB2 v9 MS SQL Server 2005

JDK

Appserver

Database

Recommended

Linux (2.6 Kernel)

Sun Java 6 (Latest JDK 1.6)

Apache Tomcat 6.0.10 (or later in 6.0.x series)

Postgres 8.x

Supported

Windows Server 2003 SP2
Linux (2.6 Kernel)
Solaris 10

Sun Java 6 (JDK 1.6)
IBM Java 6 (JDK 1.6)

Sun Java 5 (JDK 1.5)
IBM Java 5 (JDK 1.5)

Apache Tomcat 6.0.10 (or later)
IBM Websphere 6.1, Fixpack 11+
BEA Weblogic 9.2
JBoss 4.0.x, 4.2.x, or 4.3.x

MySQL 5.x
Oracle 11.x
Postgres 8.x
Oracle 10.x
IBM DB2 v9
MS SQL Server 2005

Finally, some information about language support roadmap in the 2.5.x series:

Release	Languages
2.5.1 (Sept 8)	English, Spanish
2.5.2 (Sept 29)	French, Simplified Chinese, German
2.5.3 (Oct 20)	Italian, Japanese

Clearspace 2.5 Officially Announced

matt@jivesoftware.com — 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@jivesoftware.com — 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@jivesoftware.com — 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@jivesoftware.com — 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@jivesoftware.com — 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