This this is going to not only be fun and action-packed, it's going to be informative to boot. Packed with answers and lively challenges, Social Software Jeopardy is a one-time special online event. So far over 500 people have signed up. It's this Wednesday, May 28th. Register now if you want to join us. And no, that's not my real mustache.
Our Clearspace 2.0 launch was very exciting. The media, blogosphere, and twittersphere response was overwhelming. Our team has been cranking hard for many months to bring Clearspace 2.0 to market, and it is an honor to have this much interest in our work. A big thanks to everyone at Jive. Below is a sample of the 50+ articles that were written about the new 2.0 and the Jotlet acquisition:
Jive Clearspace 2.0: a clear improvement, by Dennis Howlett on Enterprise Alley/ZDNet
Jive Brings Consumer-Style Coolness to the Enterprise, by Marshall Kirkpatrick on ReadWrite Web
Jive Software Releases Clearspace 2.0, Acquires Jotlet, by Mark Hendrickson on TechCrunch
Jive Clearspace 2.0 is named "2.0" for a reason, by Rick Turoczy on Silicon Florist
Jive's Clearspace: Using Web 2.0 tools to avoid e-mail in business, by Martin LaMonica on CNET
Collaborative software company Jive acquires Jotlet, gets better project management, by Anthony Ha on VentureBeat
Jive, Maker of Enterprise Wikis and Blogs, Announces Integration with Sharepoint, by Chris Lynch on CIO.com
Jive adds social network to collaboration software, by Heather Havenstein on Computerworld
For a larger list of articles that came out, you can find more aggregated on BlogPulse
The chart below shows the blogging buzz surrounding Jive Software this past Monday & Tuesday, versus the past two months (from Nielsen BuzzMetrics' BlogPulse). Big spike! Look to the right of the chart:
We'll be writing a series posts over the next few weeks to walk-through the new features that we're most excited about:
Personalized homepage - The widgetized home page is geared to drive faster adoption and improve employee focus and attention
Expanded profile and org charts - Rich user profiles and organizational relationships increase context about people and make it easier to develop connections and find expertise. It provides a Facebook-like user browsing experience, but presented in a business-oriented org chart.
Project spaces - Projects are designed to drive cross-functional productivity and manage towards an outcome, with tasks, checkpoints, and calendar views.
Sharepoint integration - Integration helps bring unity across a common corporate intranet and leverages existing systems rather than creating yet another siloed system.
External document sharing - Secure document sharing outside the firewall enables productivity tools to be extended to external partners and vendors when needed.
Audit tools - The admin console's audit view provides visibility and control to IT administrators regarding any changes in the admin console.
Backend upgrades - Upgrades to the core Clearspace underpinnings make it faster and more reliable.
Earlier this week, the DataPortability WorkGroup was sent a Cease and Desist order by Red Hat to stop using their logo. Opting to take the high road, Chris Saad and the crew decided to hold a logo contest to rebrand the DataPortability WorkGroup. To show our support and to get the prize bandwagon moving, Jive was the first to donate a prize, which was an iPhone. Since then, the prize list has grown to an impressivly long list of goodies, such as:
iPhone from Jive Software
Weeks ad space on Techcrunch! Thanks to Michael Arrington over at Techcrunch
A Month ad space on either CenterNetworks (www.centernetworks.com) or
HTMLCenter (www.htmlcenter.com) thanks to Allen Stern
$100 from Bub.blicio.us thanks to Brian Solis
$100 of Compete Credits to get access to premium reports thanks to Jay Meattle at Compete.
$500 and a “I’d sync that” T-shirt from Plaxo thanks to John McCrea
An A0 Trendmap from Information Architects
$100 from HedgeHog Lab
We believe in the work that the DataPortability WorkGroup is doing and are proud to support their rebranding effort. If you would like to see the logo submissions, check out their Flickr pool. The deadline for submissions is March 11, 2008.
Good luck!
On the heals of being nominated for a Codie, turns out we're also up for the Intranet Journal product of the year award. But that award is determined by votes, American Idol style.
That means you gotta click three more buttons. This one, then the radio button under "Document Management/Collaboration Product," and then "submit."
Can we have your support? Bribe-wise, we've got trail mix if you want to stop by the office.
Today we got an email from the Software & Information Industry Association telling us that Clearspace has been selected as a finalist for Best Collaboration Software Solution. Here are the other finalists:
• Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional, Adobe Systems, Inc.
• Citrix GoToMeeting, Citrix Online
• Central Desktop
• Clearspace, Jive Software
• SightSpeed 6.0, SightSpeed, Inc.
We use Adobe Acrobat connect for web-meetings and we like it a lot. Haven't tried GoToMeeting, though I know a lot of people have. Central Desktop is a cool company, we've recently had a good chat with them. Not up to speed on SightSpeed so I'll have to check them out. Looks like a good group!
Changing company logos is akin to coming up with a new national flag. It never immediately feels like you. And honestly, logos are a pain in the butt. It's hard stuff and harder at Jive because we're so passionate about good ones. Not to mention, our old logo has been around for seven years and has a lot of sentimental value. We've had to deal with new logos at the product level the last couple of years. For you die-hards, you might remember my post on what it took to come up with the Clearspace logo many moons ago.
But before then, we had planned to change Jive's corporate logo. The "Bullhorn" didn't represent collaboration as much as it did an individual voice. And it certainly didn't match the new product logos and corporate identity. We hired a designer to help us back then but it didn't result in anything we loved. It was just a painful experience and we decided to table it and concentrate on Clearspace.
That behind us now, we embarced on re-addressing Jive's logo a few months ago and this time we shared responsibility in designing it with our mate Raja who had helped us with our product logos. Our design team lead by Michael (with help from Chris, John, Ryan and Amy) were equal members with Raja and Mike Erickson in arriving at the new mark. Big props go to them.
So, today we begin the long, arduous process of switching out the "old bully" with our new mark. We've started with our website and will be fully transitioned over the next couple of months. We're super happy with Jive's new logo and hope you like it, too. Even though it's brand new, we already feel like it perfectly reflects who we are as a company.
To encourage more interaction, innovation, and collaboration, companies must become more porous by continuing to break down barriers to interactions -- barriers such as hierarchies and organizational silos. Workers will exchange information if there is a fair return on sharing it and a clear value for seeking it.How cool is the word "porous?" It perfectly reflects the level of liquidity lacking in our collaboration with each other. Anyway, we recently pulled some reports out of Jive's own internal Clearspace instance to get a sense of how are working with each other. There's a ton of insight and I'll share more in other posts. Note that we're around 150 employees and have been using Clearspace for a year, but this should be pretty statistically significant. (Big props to Dan Short for pulling this together.)h3. A look at how departments engage with each other
This shows the relationship between department and space for individual pieces of content. Content created within a common space/department has been removed (e.g. content created in the marketing space by marketing individuals was removed) in order to get a better view of cross-functional hot spots.
I think this chart is interesting for a number of reasons, but I'm particularly struck by the level of interaction between Sales and Professional Services. As the size of the bubble suggests, this is the single most active intersection within Jive (business critical!). The Sales to PS handshake is notoriously problematic for many, many companies. Using Clearspace to support an improved Sales to Implementation process through better cross-functional collaboration has the makings of a great story.
Similar approach to the above view but in this case the overall size of the pie represents total cross-functional activity within that space and then the individual slices show the contribution of the various departments. This view shows the contribution of the sales organization to the different spaces across Jive (other than sales).
This is way to capture the relationship of all publishing activity across Jive relative to where it is happening. In this case, the size of each block represents total publishing activity within that space and the color shade represents the proportion (percent) of cross-departmental contribution (the darker the shade the greater the proportion of cross-department collaboration). Based on this chart, it appears that Jive collaborates the most around product concepts, product integration, new product ideas, and some other boxes too small to show up. 
The cool thing is that we have several partner customers who are giving us access to their dashboard data, too so we'll be able to learn much more about the patterns and values beyond our own company. This will allow us to develop smarter ROI dashboards and perhaps develop some relevant product features.
Twitter has been the subject of much discussion as of late, but not for good reasons. Today, Twitter announced that they are officially done with their hosting partnership with Joyent. Was Twitter demanding better reliability? Or, was Twitter getting it's affairs in order (there are some rumors of a Twitter acquisition in the works). I find it interesting that Twitter would say how much they loved Joyent just before severing ties. Then they told us everything was back up again, but then updated that post to say not exactly.
When Shel originally crafted his open letter to Twitter from the most recent outages, he captured the sentiments we were all feeling. I even commented about it on my own blog. Now, I am not convinced Twitter can handle. And, I don't think it's Twitter's fault.
Dave Winer started a great discussion about Twitter's problems by asking " Why does Twitter go down?"
In plain English, Skype uses a decentralized architecture. Exactly the opposite of Twitter. That's why it scales so well. The reason Twitter goes down is because the more friends people have, the more notifications need to be mirrored. One notice from a user with 100 friends, is 100 notifications. It's a multiplying effect. If many users with many followers are updating their status, the system experiences extreme load and we get the Twitter blue screen of death.
However, a peer to peer solution won't meet business demands for security (why send a message out to the Internet when it just needs to go to the person next to you), which means a distributed architecture would be more appropriate, similar to email.
The reality is that Twitter has grown into something more than any one service should be responsible for. In fact, cottage industries have formed around the service, and VentureBeat astutely points out the harm a Twitter outage causes cottage services.
It's time for Twittering to break free from it's cage.
I love when reporters ask me whether social software can be productive in the enterprise. Their questions always begin with something like, "why would an employee use something like Facebook at work?" (First off, if it actually was Facebook they wouldn't use it for work, but that's a different post.) The implicit assumption is that employees would sit around adding friends and poking each other. I understand the perception, since social tools like blogs, social networking, and Twitter started in the consumer space.
But it's like saying email is totally ridiculous at work.
Email started as a goofy tool. You sent it to your friends instead of letters. "Grandma! It's me, I'm writing you a letter from my computer!" But as soon as we took it into the workplace, it had purpose by definition. We were at work. We did work things. I guess there may have been a moment of, "Hey Bob, I'm sending you an email. Testing. Testing. Is this thing on?" But then Bob said "yes, now what the hell
do you want. We have work to do."
The same questions I get today about social productivity software were asked of email at that time. How is email productive? What's the ROI? The bigger challenge I see with social productivity software is that it's hard to explain and far less analogous. Email was easy. "It's like a letter, but on your computer." Try that with blogging, wikis, rss or the hundreds of vowel-less companies associated with social software. It doesn't help that we've chosen the word "social" as the prefix.
The funny thing is that we're trapping ourselves with this language. If the button said, "status report" instead of "blog," people would go,"oh!" click on it and get started.
I know I talk about Frankensuites all the time but rarely do I get to peer into the belly of one and see the mania.
Check out this diagram on the history of Sharepoint (large version). Does this scare anyone else? Where are they going to bolt on their social software?
Props to Aaron Johnson for the tip.
I recently heard that Xerox just rebranded their whole company and launched an online community so I went to take a look. What I found made me feel sorry for whoever tried to champion the project. Most companies think that you just turn the community software on and it will somehow, magically create a community. Many of those companies marginalize the effort as some sort of "feel good" check-box they know they need but aren't sure why. Worst case, they really just want another place to Market their stuff. In these situations, the initiative is never connected to their business strategy or seen as core. These community managers (and their bossess bosses boss) can learn a little from our beefy friends at Orange County Chopper. That in mind, consider these five suggestions:
I don't own a motorcycle. I'm not even close to being mechanically-oriented. But getting close to the product process and having the opportunity to see behind the scenes totally grabs my interest. Especially since it feels like reality even though I know it's produced. Ironically, I talked to someone today who just left Xerox. She told me that Xerox's culture is super product-centric and there are fanatical product people there. Oh really? Well let's see that! Give those people an ok place to geek out and make me care. It will be great for the public and help the product group engage more directly with customers. Then the community becomes less "feel good" and more important.
Reality television humanizes the story. It shows us-- in this case-- a garage filled with people making mistakes, decisions and connections. Sometimes the interactions are ugly. It's ok. Show us that. Involve us in it. Yes, I realize you have to control certain things. But so does reality tv.
Those guys have to ditch their plans all the time. They tinker on a bike, back up and talk about it, then throw out what doesn't work. Changing directions publicly is ok. Especially if you involve the rest of us along the way.
There's no doubt that everyone on American Chopper loves what they do. It makes me love it, too. Find the passionate people in your company and bring them to the forefront. If you're not into it, how can we be? Show us, don't tell us.
Those Chopper guys always have crazy deadlines. They collaborate closely with the paint, chrome, and parts vendors they work with. It's one team even though they don't all work at Orange County Chopper. There's no reason you can't involve interested stakeholders in your ideas and make them part of your process, too. If you're worried about doing it publicly, set up a private place to invite them. Give other people a wrench, too.
I'm sure there's more ideas but I wanted to throw these out. Chime in if you have some.
Yesterday two pretty cool things happened. Clearspace X won InfoWorld's Technology of the Year award for "Best Community Platform." We also had our biggest new hire orientation day in the company's history. I think it was close to 15 new people, which is more people than were at Jive when I started.
