Blog Posts From Jive Developer Blog Tagged With jive_software

Support Design Introduction

communities@jivesoftware.com — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:47:06 GMT

Supportal

This is the first in a series of upcoming blog posts where we will delve into the details behind our Supportal. As most of our customers are already aware, the Supportal is Jive's Clearspace customization that transforms generic communities into personal communities where Jive collaborates directly with our customers via cases, documents, and projects.

This first post will provide the high-level overview, overriding design goals, business goals, and additional benefits to the Supportal. Future posts will delve into the business decision details, and the architecture.

The Name

People often ask how the name Supportal came to be. When it comes to overall creativity, I am horrible. In this project's infancy, I used Customer Portal, Customer Support Portal, Support Portal, and many other terms as names. Will French, Jive's Senior Support Engineer, and now the Supportal Development Lead, abbreviated Support Portal, to Supportal (likely making fun of me talking too fast), and the name stuck. It also gets rid of that stigma around the word "portal" as well!

Reasons for the Supportal

The Supportal was created to resolve's Support's own business pains. Prior to identifying the business pains however, we set 3 main overriding goals for the project:

Simplicity: The goal of the supportal is to solve business pain. Too many other support sites are tough to use and hard to navigate. Creating a case needs to be as simple and easy as possible. We continue this philosophy on upcoming features, ensuring that additional features add benefit without causing pain.
Accessibility: Customers weren't getting the information they needed, and people within Jive were not seeing the information they needed. The solution needed to include as many people as possible, while still being private so that only Jive and the customer can see the information.
Usability: Jive prides itself on this, and this is something that's always on our list. Making the Supportal as usable as possible is also a guiding factor we focused on during the first iteration and continue to improve upon.

With the overriding goals set, we identified the following business goals:

Create a solution where customers can go to create all their cases, regardless of severity
Replace email with an online system as the mode of communication
Recreate survey information. Associate the survey to the case.
Integrate Discussions (only community) with cases to provide customers with a single location to get their answer.
Provide customers the ability to create public cases, allowing others (outside Jive support) to read, contribute, and resolve, while ensuring that Jive Support will answer your issue.
Provide the same functionality (email) for customers who refuse to use the new system.
Remove manual customer and contract validation process

Solution

With the business goals identified, we realized that we had to integrate with our online community. Clearspace provided communities (security for each customer), email notification, reply by email, discussions, and a means to replace email as the primary mode of communication. 80% of the work was done for us. The missing parts were:

Auto-creation of customer communities via account, customer, and contract information in Salesforce
Validating customer ability to create cases upon user login
Adding meta data into customer community discussions, allowing them to become cases.
Customizing customer communities to show cases instead of discussions.
Synchronizing the cases (specifically the meta data) with Salesforce.
Paging for Severity 1 cases
Surveys
Creating cases via email

The following blog posts are going to delve into these sections providing more information behind each business goal, and how we customized Clearspace to solve the goal.

Additional Benefits

As with many solutions, we quickly realized that the Supportal can be used for more than just customer cases. The first additional use case for the Supportal was identified when our professional services team started using Clearspace's project functionality within the Secure Communities. This was exactly what Clearspace Projects were intended for, and the Supportal solved our PS department's communication requirements perfectily with no additional customizations.

We also have experienced a slight decrease in overall cases due to the increased visibility of the cases. Managers will frequently apply a community watch so that they receive emails whenever anyone creates a case in their community. We have had managers reply to a case telling us to disregard the case due to it being something they need to solve internally. We have also had managers follow up with their team directly when issues are stagnating, allowing us to resolve issues quicker.

Finally, the public case feature is being used for about 7% of all of our cases. Not a huge number, but definitely significant, and each additional case that is made public results in additional information in our community for others to see and use. This stat is without us pushing the feature at all.

Theming in Clearspace 2.0

communities@jivesoftware.com — Mon, 12 May 2008 16:58:01 GMT

As you know, we changed a few things in our underlying architecture for Clearspace 2.0, including some changes in the Freemarker templates as a result of moving from Webwork to Struts along with some other changes. In this video, Matt Walker, Professional Services Engineer at Jive Software, talks about the process of upgrading existing themes along with plenty of best practices to make your themes more easily upgradeable in the future.

Matt also did an earlier screencast as an Introduction to Skinning Clearspace, which you might also want to watch along with this video.

You can also download the Quicktime version (Caution: file is ~200MB), or you can watch a larger version online, which will improve readability of embedded screenshots (recommended).

The entire presentation is also attached below as a PDF file.

Craziest Ideas to Improve Clearspace

communities@jivesoftware.com — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 01:01:06 GMT

I asked our developers here at Jive to respond to the following in 15 seconds or less: tell me your craziest idea for how to improve Clearspace. Here is what they came up with, but make sure you hang around for the bloopers at the end!

Or download the Quicktime movie (~58MB)

Clearspace Performance Tuning

communities@jivesoftware.com — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 22:20:45 GMT

Learn about the many things you can do to improve the performance of your Clearspace installation. Support Engineer, Will French, covers everything from tweaking cache sizes to running query stats in this Jivespace video.

Or download the Quicktime version (Caution: ~100MB file size)

The Differences Between Clearspace and Clearspace X, Part 1

communities@jivesoftware.com — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 16:42:06 GMT

Thanks to some great feedback from community members I wanted to clearly articulate the current differences between Clearspace and Clearspace X as well as provide sense of how the products will continue to diverge over time. You can also check out a video on the same topic.

When Clearspace was under development we realized that trying to force a single product into two very different use cases was a bad idea. Since Clearspace and Clearspace X serve different purposes, and have a different set of users and buying criteria, we decided to give them each their own focus. Clearspace is focused on giving people inside organizations a place to "get work done" that breaks down silos between groups, gives everyone a voice and recognition, and keeps people in the loop. Clearspace X, on the other hand, focuses on providing a full-featured online community solution where the needs are around customers getting support, providing feedback, sharing ideas and connecting with other users. This distinction allows our development teams to focus on solving specific business problems instead of worrying about how one product must "boil the ocean" by solving everyone's needs.

Current Differences

The current feature differences stem from different configuration defaults and exposed functionality. Over time the products will diverge more significantly as new features are created for each use case. However, at an architectural level the differences between the products are basically non-existent, and we don't expect the two products to diverge architecturally in any meaningful way.

Name	Description
Profile Fields	The two products contain different default profile fields: Clearspace contains 'location', 'title', 'phone number', 'biography' and 'expertise'. Clearspace X contains 'location', 'occupation', 'biography', 'expertise', and 'homepage'.
Create Blog Permission	Registered users are given permission by default to create a blog in Clearspace but are not allowed to create a blog unless given permission in Clearspace X.
Guest Access	Anonymous / guest users are allowed to view content in Clearspace X by default, but in Clearspace that permission is off which forces users to first login before viewing any content.
Private Messages	Private messages are enabled by default in Clearspace X and disabled by default in Clearspace.
Blog Trackbacks	Blog trackbacks are off by default in Clearspace but on by default in Clearspace X.
Blog Pings	Blog pinging is enabled by default in Clearspace X and disabled by default in Clearspace. Blog pinging is a process that happens behind the scenes in most blog software. When enabled, your instance will send an XML-RPC ping to weblogs.com, Google blog search and Technorati, but only if blog pinging is enabled when a new blog post is created / published on your system.
Email Visibility	Email addresses on user profiles are hidden by default in Clearspace X and are visible by default in Clearspace.
Language	Clearspace X uses the word 'Community' when describing the containers for content while Clearspace uses the word 'Space'.
Design	Clearspace X uses a different design than Clearspace. The difference is controlled by using jive-external.css versus jive-internal.css.

More Differences Over Time

Over time there will be certain features or changes that only make sense in one or the other product.

Name	Description
Reputation and Recognition	The way that the reputation and recognition system work will change over time as each product gets a more focused version of the system.
Read/Write WebDAV	This type of functionality only makes sense in Clearspace for most customers.
Certain Integrations	Integrations with other systems may only make sense in one use case or the other.

Summary

Clearspace and Clearspace X have different purposes and are meant to solve different problems. So it only makes sense that we want the respective development teams to be thinking about those problems as they further refine the product. The current differences are primarily focused on configuration to best fit the problem being solved by each product, but these differences will continue to grow as new features are added that are unique to its intended use case.

Differences Between Clearspace and Clearspace X

communities@jivesoftware.com — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 23:21:46 GMT

Want to better understand the differences between Clearspace and Clearspace X along with some ideas for how the two products may evolve over time? Learn more from Jive Software's Aaron Johnson and Greg Unrein.

Or download the Quicktime Movie (Caution: 166MB File)

What Do You Like about Clearspace?

communities@jivesoftware.com — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 20:14:49 GMT

We asked this question to more than 50 Jive Software employees and got their answers on video for the world to see! Make sure you stick around for the bloopers at the end of the video.

Or download the Quicktime movie (Caution: 207MB download)

Events in Clearspace

communities@jivesoftware.com — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 21:27:00 GMT

Learn about event handling within Clearspace from Bruce Ritchie.

Or download the Quicktime movie

Clearspace: Anatomy of a Product Launch

communities@jivesoftware.com — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 20:35:00 GMT

Bill Lynch, Aaron Johnson, and AJ Wright spent an evening at PJUG (Portland Java Users Group) talking about everything that went into the launch of Jive Software's Clearspace product. You might also want to follow along with the presentation.

Caution: I try to keep most of the videos edited down to 5-10 minutes, but this is the full 35 minute presentation.

Or download the Quicktime version

Josh Bancroft on Facebook, Social Networks, and More

communities@jivesoftware.com — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 21:43:00 GMT

I was able to corner Josh Bancroft, Intel Social Media Evangelist, at a recent blogger dinner at the Jive Software offices (co-sponsored by Intel, but organized by the Portland blogging community). In this video, Josh discusses Facebook, hype around social networks that do not exist, and living life online.

Or click here to download.

Clearspace Themes Explained

communities@jivesoftware.com — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 18:15:00 GMT

In this video, Jive Software's Nick Hill talks about how to create themes for Clearspace.

Or click here to watch the video.

Bug Day at Jive Software

communities@jivesoftware.com — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 18:07:00 GMT

What happens when Jive Software engineers take the day off of their regular jobs to squash bugs? Watch and find out ... stick around for the outtakes at the end.

And no, Jive engineers are not greenish colored elves. You can blame the videographer (me) for having the camera on some weird setting; however, the video has some really fun content that I wanted to share despite the poor quality of the recording.

Or click here to watch the video.

Plugin Day at Jive Software

communities@jivesoftware.com — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 20:54:00 GMT

Occasionally at Jive Software, our developers take a day off from their regular jobs to spend the day writing plugins for our products. After taking Friday off to write plugins for our new Clearspace product, we gathered at 4PM to do a quick review of our creations. This is what happens when a room full of Jive Software employees geek out over cool collaboration technology.

Click here to watch the video