Blog Posts From Friends of Jivespace Tagged With clearspacex

Did You Know - Clearspace/SBS and Friend Management

communities@jivesoftware.com — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 04:04:14 GMT

An interesting aspect to the system is the concept of Friend Management. In our organization, this is sleeper functionality. When you befriend someone, you can use labels to organize your friendships into meaningful groupings. In the UI, go to Your Stuff > Friends and on the right hand side you'll see the Add/edit Labels.

You might be asking: What can this do for me?

By grouping your friends/connections into these buckets, you get an RSS Aggregation feed that notifies you when anyone in that grouping performs an action.

This is a very powerful way to follow people in the organization, whether you are in the SBS Dashboard, RSS Feed Reader, or external system with RSS Consumption Services.

Users can have multiple labels, so you can bleed a person across the different areas as you deem necessary by simply applying multiple labels to your friends. Another important element is that this association is controlled by the user, not by the system.

It's pretty easy and very powerful, so give it a whirl and let me know what you think! Any one have any other sleeper features they'd like to share? Shout 'em out! =)

Emphasizing the "Social" in Clearspace's "Social Productivity"

communities@jivesoftware.com — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 20:23:48 GMT

At the university where I work, we use Clearspace X for student communities that are moderated by faculty members. A new position, Director of Social Network Development, was recently created in our IT department, and I will be applying for it. In preparation for my application, here are a few pieces of information I've gathered regarding possible integration of Clearspace with social networks.

Jive, with initial development by Face It!, recently released a Facebook *Beta* Plugin for Clearspace 1.10x. In the The specified thread was not found., Dawn said that plugin will need to be ported to Clearspace 2.0 before it can no longer be considered beta. The Facebook plugin integrates the users' Facebook profiles into their Clearspace profiles, while allowing each user to control how (or if) their Facebook information is shown.

The Flickr Slideshow macro displays a flickr slideshow in a Clearspace blog post, document, or discussion message.

The YouTube Macro makes it easy to display YouTube videos in Clearspace documents, blog posts, and discussion messages.

Clearspace's The specified document was not found. plugin helps you to scrape images from various social networks like MySpace, Socializer, etc.

Clearspace's blog pinging will send a ping to weblogs.com, Google blog search, and Technorati if blog pinging is enabled when a new blog post is created/published on your system. By default it is disabled in Clearspace and enabled in Clearspace X.

Windows Live Writer can be used to publish Clearspace blog posts.

In What does Google and Facebook's validation of DataPortability mean for the Enterprise?, Sam mentioned that Jive has committed to clear standards, like XMPP, and will commit to new standards as they clarify. Given the gravity of Google and Facebook, he feels DataPortability should be one of them. The purpose of the DataPortability project is to put existing technologies, techniques, policies and initiatives in context in order to facilitate translation, education, advocacy and ultimately implementation of data portability. Portability is defined as both physically moving data or simply porting the context in which the data is used.

I'm looking for additional social features and plugins to appear in Clearspace in the near future. Maybe Jive can find ways to use the new Ringside Social Application Server to further the social aspects of Clearspace.

ClearspaceX - Really Know What Your User's Want!

communities@jivesoftware.com — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 17:30:03 GMT

Because it's what the users want...

Or perhaps,

If we change it, then the user's will stop using it!

I know I am not alone in my innate skepticism to general statements such as these. But how do you know what the users want? More importantly, how can someone make the argument that users will stop using it? These are great questions, where the answers in the Web 1.0 mentality are as ethereal as time travel. A proverbial stalemate in most case, resulting in most people choosing not to ask!

This is where I see a great opportunity for the Clearspace(X) platform. With its bevvy of features, including Polling, Forums, Reporting, and OpenFire Presence Integrations, I see the gap between the answers to questions like these closing rapidly. Let's take a look at how I would propose the use of ClearspaceX and an established community to address these situations.

Proposed Case

Company ABC has an interactive user application XYZ. Non-company users use the ABC daily, posting information that has grown to be critical for company ABC efficiencies. However, the company is evaluating a need to update the interface/functionality for XYZ. In a meeting where solutions are pitched, a suggestion is made that will make XYZ more robust in the long-haul; however, as a trade-off, some of XYZ's existing functionality will need to be accessed differently, behaviorally changed, and/or lost all together. After the dust settles, the aforementioned suggestion holds the best long-term strategies at heart; however, it is constrained by the above tactical constraints. How do we proceed?

(assumption, statistically relevent sample of the user's of XYZ are reachable via an Online Community. Kind of a Catch-22, but provides reasoning on why a community platform investment is valueable)

Step #1 - Polling

In the community, we would post some high-level Polls to gauge initial feedback. Variations of the question could resemble something of this nature:

Which of the following features listed , do you feel is the most important?The answer set should include all features impacted by the recommended change, unless the list is long, in which case I would break the Poll into multiple Polls spanned over an appropriate time range. In each of these Polls, it is important to provide an option similar to, "None of the Features are important to me". Assuming we receive a large enough sample, we can immediately add some credence to the argument that the highly nominated features are in-fact relevant to a certain degree. An optional last poll could be taken to run the top most selected features from each poll together, to see their rank against each other.

At this point, we may or may not have additional steps. Assuming that a large percentage of people did not select the "None of the Features are important to me"...we can now go to the next step.

Step #2 - Targetted Forums

Now that you have some direction where there MAY be some friction, using the Forums element, post some questions to the community, suggesting the necessary changes to the features. Be up front about the impact, this is important. If the feature will not be there, dont sugar coat. A simple table presentation or easily digestable format is recommended. You can choose to possibly only include your top-ranked poll selections if desired. It will reduce the noise of the discussion thread most certainly; however, you risk losing an opportunity to get candid viral feedback about these features. If any doubt, error on the side of inclusion!

Assuming we get a similar turnout for feedback, we can evaluate specific elements of a feature that are desired and focus on possibly achieving that vs. the entire feature altogether. At this point, we should feel fairly confident in our understanding of these features, and their impact on application XYZ!

Note: In most communities you have "star performers" that represent above-average participation in the community. Be sure to take their feedback into consideration as a tie-breaker when in doubt.

Step #3 - Real-Time Interaction

If further clarity is stil needed, you can advertise an online chat, using the OpenFire Chat Integration in ClearspaceX. Invite the target audience of participatns from the polls and forums, along with the rest of the community. In this chat, I would be even more candid about why you are on the fence. Ask direct questions to community, and open the floor for discussion. Discussions in real-time tend to draw out more debate as they tend to favor hot instinctive discussion, as opposed to cold predicated thought.

Each one of these steps can be repeated in any order at this point to achieve the desired level of comfort, but at the end of the day. You have tangible/quantifiable facts that represent the user-base, and can depend less on abstractions / interpretations of off-topic indirect feedback possibly related to the feature(s).

Summation

For companies that are highly dependent on satisfying a large distributed set of end-users, a community presence makes perfect business sense. Not only can you argue the traditional "self-service" argument as users help each other, but an established community platform provides a sounding board for the business to create quick and statistically relevant analysis for litmus testing ideas in the incubation stage. This will help to insure that ideas with solid business models with complementing solid understandings of the user receptiveness to said ideas are put at the forefront of development. In the new era of Web 2.0, where agility is king, the concept of a community presence is an invaluable ally in building brand loyality with an ever-growing and demanding marketplace.

If you have similar experiences and/or feedback regarding the above process, I would love to hear it. Especiially regarding how receptive communities are to cooperative changes to a community, in the face of losing features, as long as they are part of the process and the change is for the greater good.

Federating Clearspace

communities@jivesoftware.com — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 17:26:38 GMT

I have posted before under the title Clearspace Y, a phase I coined to cover the simultaneous implementation of Clearspace (Internal) and Clearspace X (External). Indeed, I have by-and-large implemented this with our own Clearspace implementation. It consists of two main sub-spaces, one covering the internal community, the other external communities.

Clearspace Y is not what Clearspace is designed to do since there are some holes in achieving sufficient separation . A good example of this is people information which is visible across the communities. I've had some success with blogs since the blog access control is orthogonal to the space access control. I really like the aggregation of blogs so that you can collate them for different user groups.

The worry of course is publishing something that you don't want to go outside of your Chinese walls - an odd concept for a community I know. However, what's needed is the best of both worlds - privacy and openness. After all even Clearspace has the ability to send private emails and enclosed collaborative workflow approvals.

So, should we have one instance of Clearspace Y to service both communities?

Or, should we think more in terms of federating two or more Clearspace instances?

Perhaps I should declare my own take on what federation means. Federation is where related communities are free to do their own thing but agree on certain commonality for mutual benefit - some content is shared, other content is not. A common platform architecture and functionality certainly underpins a lot that can be done to share and collaborate.

Federation perhaps has these two aspects: platform and content. Either way the aim is to blur the boundaries and share more. I see this scenario as being more likely in smaller organizations than larger ones.

In technical circles Federation has some specific meaning which can be similar, but I'm not trying to imply some grand technical solution. Rather I'd first like to explore the notion and validity of how two or more communities at a macro level could benefit from being more closely linked.

I can envisage some truly common areas that embrace openness and discovery. One of the most powerful aspects of Clearspace is what I call the churn view or the what's new - be it a blog, discussion or document. It's the froth coming to the top. The heritage from this coming from discussion groups.

I also see the need for private areas - be it internal/external partitions or external/external e.g. a customer project space.

Returning to the churn, its what gets aggregated into this churn that makes it even more powerful - I will to be seen, if I'm interesting, I'll get popular. We'd need the ability to make content aggregateable ( the want that leads to the will), much like we can do with blogs. However, I would suspect that aggregating whole spaces may be too large grained.

Attractable content also applies to specific shared spaces i.e. two groups want to work jointly on something. I've partly implemented this using sub-spaces, the parent being the common area and the sub-spaces the private aspects. The parent level being the aggregation, if you have access rights to the sub-spaces as well. I'd say for this that space level granularity would probably be OK.

Well there's the thought.

Random ClearspaceX Ideas...

communities@jivesoftware.com — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 18:25:39 GMT

Since this Blog really has taken shape yet, I guess I get the benefit of setting a possible tone moving forward. In that regard, I hope this tone is appropriate, but from a platform perspective, I see nothing but possibilities for the Clearspace(X) platform in growing collaboration across disparate teams.

In my company, we are currently working to try and create less obscure lines between community initiatives and revenue. Obviously the immediate first phase for attempts such as this are to try and merge into existing systems, while over time, if the technology is pervasive enough, it can ultimately change the systems to a new paradigm. Given that we've only recently gone live with CleraspaceX 1.9.0 on OAS10g 10.1.3.3.0, we are unfortunately in the former stages of this process.

As such, some ideas that we had to leverage some of ClearspaceX's unique features include the following:

Leveraging the Listener Framework and Filters to process content at create/edit time against a custom dictionary of terms and matching URL structures...and storing meta-data on the document/thread/blog post for rendering actions to take into consideration when rendering the item for display. The hopes would be to do one of the following: provide a list of relevant links off to the side of the document that would help drive traffic towards measureable calls to action. If we were bold enough, we could apply these meta-data instructions as a filter, and alter the appearance of the actual words in the content as hyperlinks. This might be too intrusive to our customers, and we'll need to evaluate the nice balance between content ownership and ROI. =)
Abstracting the Ratings Engine in ClearspaceX as a Ratings Service for all content on the website. We've been looking at the possibility, of creating a private community visible only to Admins and WebService logins, and then creating Document Stubs into that community and capturing Ratings regarding non-ClearspaceX pages on those assets, and then surfacing the ratings to the remote sites as well through the same Web Service APIs. Since ClearspaceX is integrated into our SSO solution, we already know that we are talking apples to apples between the 2 systems. We just need to work out logistics of whether or not a user (who is logged in), has a "username" or as we call it "alias" when they rate...and how to handle the corner-cases that stem from that core issue.

Some others ideas that I do not have time to rant on include dynamic forum threads injected via Web Service integration, integration with internal document creation workflows into ClearspaceX, as well as leveraging Web Services to creating micro-communities for bolstering real-time sales opportunities between sales and customer seeking assistance.

Currently, a pet project of mine is to get OpenFire setup and see what ideas come from that....

I hope this content has spurred some thoughts about how I envisioned ClearspaceX being used (at least from my perspective), but please comment and let us know what interests you.