Jive Talks

Announcing 2.5: A Heavy Dose of What it Takes to Make Social Software Work

communities@jivesoftware.com — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 04:41:57 GMT

This latest release is like a giant sandpaper exercise for Clearspace. Now that it's been in the wild with hundreds of large enterprise customers and hundreds of thousands of users banging away at it -- not to mention a team of Jivers sitting alongside these people with their clipboards taking notes -- we've learned quite a bit about what works and what doesn't. What did we hear from our customers?

Fix the RTE (rich text editor)!
Make everything social
Make it easy to find and follow people
Better email / mobile integration
Make it easy to customize
Make the conversations contextual

The RTE feedback was easily the loudest. Nothing will happen if you can't get people to create content easily. So we built what I consider to be the best web RTE on the planet. It's such an enjoyable experience, and makes a world of difference for our customers trying to boost adoption and participation. You have to try it out.

We also really boosted the social features in a way that works for everyone -- not just the Facebook generation. Now it's easy to find people, connect with them, and set up or join groups on the fly. You can also deliver the collaboration on any web page with just a code snippet -- for instance, an e-commerce page on snowshoes could show all the conversations about that snowshoe, or a supply chain application could show all the conversations about that supplier, or posts made by people who work for that supplier.

You should really check out the new features for yourself or take a test drive. This is hands-down the best all-around social software application on the planet. I couldn't be more proud of what this team has created.

Clearspace 2.0 in the spotlight

communities@jivesoftware.com — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 18:30:26 GMT

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

Buzz factor

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:

As the Clearspace 2.0 dust settles

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.

Stay tuned! We're looking forward to hearing what you think about Clearspace 2.0.

Announcing Clearspace 2.0 - A Giant Leap for Enterprise Social Productivity

communities@jivesoftware.com — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 02:15:08 GMT

When we launched Clearspace 1.0 in February of 2007, it was a response to an overwhelming number of enterprise customers saying the same thing: we're stuck between heavyweight collaboration apps (good for file-based workflows, but no one uses them to collaborate) and lightweight Web 2.0 apps like wikis (good for quick adoption, but incomplete, siloed and don't scale). They said, "bring all of these formerly disparate technologies into one system, make it enterprise class, and make it so highly-intuitive that anyone could use it." We did that. And it was very successful.

So now, a little over a year later, and with hundreds of customers under our belt, we're learning a lot. While Clearspace has been very successful as a lightweight way to collaborate and organize content that was historically never captured, there were some consistent issues as our customers tried to get it deployed inside their organization:

How do I drive adoption?
How do I know what to focus on?
How should we manage projects?
How does it work with my Sharepoint content?
How do I involve people outside the firewall?
How do we keep track of changes?

Enter 2.0

The driving force behind the 2.0 release was to take some of these issues head on. A good way to frame the new features (and existing / future features for that matter) is into the big categories of people, focus and work. Here's what we're launching:

People: Expanded profiles and organizational relationships. Find the right people based on the right information, and see exactly where they sit in the organization (full org chart functionality). Plus you can highlight a name and get a mini-profile.

Focus: Personalizable homepage. It's like iGoogle for your work life -- a completely widgitized homepage. No more being overwhelmed by all the content -- now you can provide your own filter to what matters most (what my colleagues are doing, what's popular, my projects, etc.).

Work: Projects, sharing and Sharepoint integration.

Projects: With very few products out there (in between heavyweight project mgmt apps and a spreadsheet), our customers were hungry for the ability to manage projects and coordinate resources at a high level, with features like milestones and tasks.
Sharing: A new cloud-based document sharing service allows you to collaborate with people outside the firewall, even if your software is installed on premise. Your guest user just logs into the service and and can start adding content to your local instance.
Sharepoint Integration: Integration with Sharepoint 2007 allows you to search, browse and link to Sharepoint content from within Clearspace.

There's also a lot of new features under the hood like recording an audit log of actions performed in the admin console, the switch to the Spring and Struts 2, and improvements to the rich text editor. You can learn more in the new Clearspace section of our site.

I've been using the release for a while now, and I'm a huge fan (projects and the widgetized homepage have made the biggest difference in my life). Please download (or test drive online), play around and let us know your thoughts.

New Website

You might also have noticed the new website. Sam, David Greenberg, and team have been hard at work on building a beauty of a site that matches the depth of the new Clearspace release. These guys have done an amazing job and they've been sleeping at the office to get it done. My hats off to them. We would love your feedback on this too, so let us know what you think:

USA Today frames the differences between Clearspace and Sharepoint

communities@jivesoftware.com — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 01:21:51 GMT

USA Today just posted a piece on how we are perceived against Sharepoint. It's not a long read, but they do a great job of framing the Clearspace approach and the Sharepoint approach. Here's a clip:

Jive Software wants to be the Apple Computer of corporate social networks. Jive's competing Clearspace system supplies all the bell and whistles in a slick, tightly integrated package. Jive only does Clearspace. I caught Chief Strategy Officer Sam Lawrence in a black Jive t-shirt gathering intelligence at Microsoft's conference. He showed me how companies like Sony, Nike and John Deere are using Clearspace to enable employees to collaborate on what functions like a highly refined Facebook-like internal web site. "We're a pleasure to use, exactly like the iPhone," Lawrence told me. "SharePoint is clunky; it’s more like FrankenSuite."

Finalist for Intranet Journal Product of the Year (but need 3 clicks from you)

communities@jivesoftware.com — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 14:21:48 GMT

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.

Clearspace is a 2008 Codie Award finalist for Best Collaboration Software Solution

communities@jivesoftware.com — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 04:24:33 GMT

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!

Proof that departments can become porous

communities@jivesoftware.com — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 21:43:52 GMT

What's awesome about having companies using a single, people-centric collaboration system is that you can get a whole new level of visibility of how people work together. That means that companies can, for the first time, see data they've never seen before. Chuck mentioned this network value in the case study I wrote up over the weekend but I thought I'd share an example. A huge part of the goal of social productivity software is to unify a company and allow them to engage with each other to get work done. To achieve this, it requires a change in behaviors, not just buying some software and hoping for the best. I like how Mckinsey refers to this:

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.

Amount our Sales Department engages with other departments

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).

Topics that have the most cross-departmental collaboration

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.

Clearspace 1.x, 2.x, and Jive's New Release Train

marty.kagan@jivesoftware.com — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 00:17:36 GMT

For my first Jive Talks post, I'd like to talk about some of the changes we're making to the release train in 2008: Internally, we are committed to continuing with an agile development process based on 3 week iterations. At the end of each of these cycles, we will make the current code available as an alpha or beta beta release for developers. Information about how to sign up for the 2.0 Beta Program should be available soon! Externally, we are aiming to launch major/minor releases once a quarter. Clearspace 2.0 has been (and continues to be) an ambitious undertaking, but we're still shooting for a release in early April. Subsequent releases (2.1, 2.2, 2.3) should land in July, October, January, etc. We're looking at adding some very exciting features this year, but I'll let others tell that story...

On the support side, we will continue to provide patch releases for up to 12 months after any major or minor release. These point releases (2.0.1, 2.0.2, etc.) will be reserved strictly for bug fixes, and contain no new functionality. As in the past, these will be released on a 3-week cycle to give the Software Quality Assurance team sufficient time for testing. We've planned for 3-4 scheduled patch releases after every major/minor release. After that, we will do patches on an ad hoc basis to address any severity 1 or 2 issues that may arise.

The 1.x series went into maintenance mode starting with 1.10. There is a 1.10.1 patch release scheduled for next week, and again, we will continue to do patches on an as-needed basis to address critical issues for up to 12 months, after which we will ask customers to upgrade to 2.x, in order to stay on a supported release.

On a personal note, I've been having a great time since joining the Jive development team in November. As you may know, we're doing a lot of hiring this year, and I would love to hear from you if you're interested in joining us!

Want a Free License of Clearspace X?

communities@jivesoftware.com — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 17:07:42 GMT

Did you know that you can get a free license of Clearspace X if you are a non-commercial open source project or developer group? This is one of the cool parts of my of my job â€¦ I get to give people free software licenses!

Our Clearspace X product just won the Best Community Platform award from InfoWorld, so we're giving you some great community software! You can read the full review on the InfoWorld site. This award is no surprise to me. We power the 2 communities that I manage, Jivespace and Ignite Realtime, on Clearspace X.

One group taking advantage of this free license program is the Open Management Consortium. Last week, they just released a beta version of their new site based entirely on Clearspace X. They managed to get the entire site up and running with the old data moved into the new site mostly over a weekend. The OMC was formed with the goal being to "advance the promotion, adoption, development and integration of open source systems /network management software." They are using Clearspace X to power the community where the members of this group collaborate, discuss ideas, and get organized about how to accomplish this goal.

If you have an open source project or a developer group (users group, etc.) and want to take advantage of the free licenses, you can find more details and a short request form on the free license page on Jivespace.

Clearspace 1.x: A Look Back

greg@jivesoftware.com — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 16:21:41 GMT

With 2007 coming to a close, I'm in a reflective mood and wanted to share some of my favorite changes to Clearspace and Clearspace X from the past year.

The change to the way discussion threads are presented is at the top of my list. Check out the difference between the way threads look in Clearspace 1.1.1 versus 1.10. In this screen shot you see the older style on the left and the newer style on the right. The newer style is threaded, and the treatment of the individual messages makes it easier to quickly understand the structure of the conversation.

A more profound change is the customizable Space Overview tab in Clearspace 1.6. By rebuilding the Overview tab with drag-and-drop widgets it became much easier to provide just the right information to visitors in a space. A long list of widgets is available, including some for pulling content in from other systems. Widgets have also been used in several customizations to add new functionality or integrate with other systems.

The "What's New" feed on the home page evolved as well. It started out as a feed of all the activity in the system, but this can be overwhelming in large, active communities. Now "What's New" can be personalized to create our own view of the activity in Clearspace. This change makes it easier to focus on your areas of interest. By clicking on "Your View" you can select only the Spaces from which you want to see new and updated content. This change can decrease the noise in "What's New" so that you can focus on what is most important to you.

Do you have a favorite change to Clearspace from the past year?

Enterprise software can be sexy AND useful

matt@jivesoftware.com — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 15:00:38 GMT

There was an interesting blogosphere battle this weekend over whether enterprise software should be "sexy". One camp says there's much to learn from the consumer space about focusing on the UI and ease of use. The other camp says there are more important fish to fry in the enterprise and that powering business processes is "sexy enough". One of my favorite links in the whole debate was to a jwz rant about how bad groupware is. Some snippets in his description of what went wrong in Netscape's evolution from a simple email client to an "enterprise" solution:

We had built this really nice entry-level mail reader in Netscape 2.0, and it was a smashing success. Our punishment for that success was that management saw this general-purpose mail reader and said, "since this mail reader is popular with normal people, we must now pimp it out to `The Enterprise', call it Groupware, and try to compete with Lotus Notes!" ...

Now the problem here is that the product's direction changed utterly. Our focus in the client group had always been to build products and features that people wanted to use. That we wanted to use. That our moms wanted to use.

"Groupware" is all about things like "workflow", which means, "the chairman of the committee has emailed me this checklist, and I'm done with item 3, so I want to check off item 3, so this document must be sent back to my supervisor to approve the fact that item 3 is changing from `unchecked' to `checked', and once he does that, it can be directed back to committee for review."

Nobody cares about that shit. Nobody you'd want to talk to, anyway. ...

If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.

When words like "groupware" and "enterprise" start getting tossed around, you're doing the latter. You start adding features to satisfy line-items on some checklist that was constructed by interminable committee meetings among bureaucrats, and you're coding toward an externally-dictated product specification that maybe some company will want to buy a hundred "seats" of, but that nobody will ever love. With that kind of motivation, nobody will ever find it sexy. It won't make anyone happy.There were probably lots of reasons that the Netscape releases failed, but losing focus on building software that people love had to be a major factor. Fast forward to an example from today -- have you ever met someone that actually likes using Sharepoint?

Another one of my favorite takes on this issue was Eddie Herrmann's discussion of the Enterprise Tyranny of the OR:

The enterprise question is not whether to choose between either process over people OR people over process. The answer is to be the genius that realizes that it can be both people AND process. Without this realization, you will see a change of heart in SAP's users of tomorrow that Dan talks about. If you leave people out of your priorities and omit them from your equation, they will find better tools to get their jobs done, even at the cost of your money saving, business process integration.Enterprise collaboration software has ignored the people part of collaboration for too long (which is pretty stupid isn't it?). In fact, it was an AND proposition that has made Clearspace 1.x so successful:

Its software that users love to use with features like wiki documents, blogs, and discussions, AND
It's software that works for the enterprise by combining all the next-gen tools in one product, providing integration with back-end systems, and by being available as on-premise software

Going forward, we're going to keep building out aggressively in both areas. But, it's people that have been most neglected by collaboration products in the past and we're out to prove there's a better way, which we illustrate with our positioning graph below. Look for an update from Bill next week with some hints about how Clearspace 2.0 will bring sexy back to enterprise software.

Ladders of Participation at Jive

communities@jivesoftware.com — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 15:00:24 GMT

We're knee-deep in a lot of "success" work these days -- that is, tying collaboration metrics to project/company success based on the client's goals. It may sound great that a company is seeing a 50% increase in question resolutions in a given week, or a 15% increase in blog posts, but what does that mean if your goal is brand awareness versus project completion time? Ultimately, this will lead to a lot of different outputs, such as whitepapers, deployment methodologies, benchmark studies and other blogs on the subject. In the meantime, I thought it would be fun to share a couple of interesting tidbits.

One of these metrics to track is the types of people participating in these communities. Forrester has provided one way of looking at this for external communities called the the Ladders of Participation, which is based on general public usage of social tools.

Forrester's take is an interesting slice into usage models and works well for most social networking sites, I'm sure. However, it breaks down a bit if you try to apply it to different scenarios since it doesn't take into account the different types of communities, of which there are many. And most of our customers aren't trying to set up social networking sites. Patrick Lambe provides a great breakdown of these types of communities in this interesting video (communities of interest, communities of circumstance, network of practice, community of practice, learning community, etc.).

For us to take advantage of a model like Forrester's, it needs to be considered in light of the business goals of each client. For instance, here's how one of our customers (a business community concerned mostly with knowledge-sharing/Q&A) looks when the model is applied. This is more of a "network of practice" according to Lambe's breakdown.

It's interesting, but weighted at the extremes, which means it's not going to be as telling, but it's still useful. Even more useful if you can set goals around it. For instance, since this particular site is interested in leads, we might want to track not only the breakdown of spectators, but set goals for conversion to collectors, where you now have more of a dialogue open with the user.

And as you would expect, this model breaks down when applied to internal communities. The types of users no longer make sense inside a company, which is typically more concerned with how fast people get answers, how much content is being created/reused, how much faster projects are completed and decisions made, etc. Out of curiosity, we decided to see how Jive's internal Clearspace instance would play out on the Ladder model:

Again, weighted at the extremes. I think the roles I would like to see for our own usage scenario would include things like:

experts	answer lots of questions, highly ranked
helpers	participate in lots of discussions in different categories
thought leaders	weighted on blogs, lots of users subscribe to them
content-creators	responsible for reusable content
processors	weighted on docs, use workflows
churchmice	lots of subscriptions, little voice/content

And I would remove the "fun" communities from the sample set -- needless to say, some folks are highly active in things that aren't mission critical :).

So, the main takeaway is that different communities have different circumstances that tie them together and therefore have unique Ladders of Participation. In order for businesses to determine if they are earning the promised value of increased productivity through social participation, we need to start defining these usage models more discreetly.

Clearspace 1.8 Released

greg@jivesoftware.com — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 18:39:00 GMT

Clearspace 1.8 was released yesterday and includes a couple of new widgets for the customizable space overview page along with a slew of minor improvements and fixes. The two new widgets included are an Activity View of what's going on in a space and a widget for showing the tag groups in a space.

The Activity View widget shows a more detailed listing of what has been happening in the space than the Recent Content widget. It displays an update for each time a comment is posted, each time new content is created or existing content is edited, and each time a poll is created or voted on.

Onboard with Clearspace

communities@jivesoftware.com — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 06:09:49 GMT

As a new employee to Jive, I've been hungry to come up to speed as quickly as possible. When I started, I was expecting my inbox to fill up quickly, and to spend long nights keeping up with the typical flow of emails. I also expected to have to hunt folks down with the email chain of "FW: FW: RE: (etc!)" to get answers to my questions.

But things are different at Jive. I don't get many emails. No one does. And although I've only been here a month, I feel completely ramped up on the company, our products, and how work gets done. As you can guess, our popular social productivity product, Clearspace, is the reason why.

We use Clearspace extensively inside Jive. It's very powerful, a huge time-saver, and an extremely efficient way for everyone to stay current with what's going on. We have discussions, debate ideas, post documentation, track progress, share knowledge and easily find current and historical information through Clearspace. This isn't just lip service. I am just one example, and onboarding is only one small productivity benefit I see in Clearspace that will continue to empower our company moving forward.

In the past, I've seen various metrics indicating it takes roughly 3-6 months to bring employees to full productivity. It's such a big deal, that there are entire industries and experts in the field who are constantly creating new software, processes, tools and best practices to reduce the "onboarding" time.

It's really impressive to experience a rapidly faster personal uptime. I can only imagine the cost benefit to other companies. Not to mention, I'm very happy to be on board.

Would you hire your productivity software?

communities@jivesoftware.com — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 12:58:02 GMT

If your current productivity software was a candidate applying for a job, I'd imagine you'd describe the applicant as frustrating, time-consuming, rigid, antisocial, and maybe "old-school." Definitely, too expensive for what they're really doing. Not exactly a flock of adjectives that would indicate a good fit.

Shouldn't we apply most of the same criteria for hiring employees that we use for productivity software? Certainly, productivity software's job expectations have changed so it's at least time for a new job description. Personality-wise, I might look for a candidate that's easy to work with, social, quick, and can jump into any situation and help. Not to mention energetic and (dare I say) fun to work with.

One prospective customer of ours is a 15,000 employee health care company. They're making their decision about which software to choose by putting different choices in front of a lot of different cross-functional employees and scoring based on a number of use criteria--including how easy the software is to use and how much the employees liked to use it. The IT department stripped several applications of their branding so they could perform this as a "blind taste test." Since everyone was going to use the software daily, they saw this process as critical. They also strongly felt like the software's values needed to reflect their culture, since culture was a key ingredient to this company's success.

Ultimately, it's time for a whole new set of productivity metrics as we move from personal productivity to social productivity. Isn't it time to take a good, hard look at your existing "productivity software" and think about having an intervention?