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.

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:

1. How do I drive adoption?

2. How do I know what to focus on?

3. How should we manage projects?

4. How does it work with my Sharepoint content?

5. How do I involve people outside the firewall?

6. 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:

About three months ago, John Miner (fellow Portlander; used to run Intel Capital) introduced me to Marty Kagan. We had been on the hunt for a good VP of Engineering for a long time, but given how naturally picky we are, and how important this role is to such an engineering-focused company, we weren't able to find anyone who fit the bill. Portland has a lot of great companies, but not many that are similar to Jive, so we were about to jump into the executive recrtuiting/relocation game. And then along came Marty.

Marty just got it. He understood what we're doing, where we're going and all of the pain points we're feeling.

Having had a very successful career at Cisco, Marty has spent the last eight years at Akamai, where he grew a large organization as the VP of Engineering. He also understood the sales perspective, having been the top SE for EMEA -- a ridiculously cool trait for any Engineering VP. And, thankfully, his family picked Portland as the next place for them to live. So he literally fell in our lap at the right time.

All of Marty's references were glowing, but the best part of the process was to read his LinkedIn profile. It's possibly the most effusive collection of references I've ever seen. Thankfully, not the standard BS references a lot people dutifully throw up to satisfy a partner, but thoughtful, genuine insights into how he works with people and what he's achieved.

So please welcome Marty to the team. We're thrilled to have him. (I expect I'll have to say that on LinkedIn as well.)

<span style="padding: 10px; float: right">

</span>Today, Intel launched Open Port, Intel's "first public online community," a site dedicated to direct communication between Intel's product & technology experts and the IT community. The video below does a better job than we could in explaining what the community is all about.  One of the many quotes I liked was

"To talk to your end user is a must. The longer it takes to make that connection the more you become disconnected from your end user and what they need and want."

Intel shows the right leadership in welcoming a myriad of views and opinions as well as their plan to engage deeply with their community. The site officially launches next week. Be sure to check it out!

Why did Sequoia choose Jive to win the space?

Sequoia has a very good handle on the market, and they saw the opportunity in the same way we did - companies were stuck between too much structure (Sharepoint) and too little structure (hundreds of point solutions), and were willing to pay money to have an integrated, community collaboration system for their employees and their customers.

So when they met Jive, and found a company that had real customers, solid revenue, profitability, a motivated team, a great product, and a track record of execution, it was a perfect fit. We want to win as much as they do, and will do what it takes to get the right people involved.

Why Sequoia?

Hands-down, these guys have one of (if not the) best track record of any VC (Oracle, Apple, Cisco, Yahoo, Google, YouTube, etc.). They brand themselves as "the entrepreneurs behind the entrepreneurs," which in our experience seems to be true. There's a lot of operational experience in those walls and they work very hard for their companies. What else?

1. Smart Growth: They allow us to see the world through a longer-term lens. Instead of making decisions in the interest of short-term profitability, we now have the ability to make investments that support our larger goals, such as acquiring a key technology or investing in remote offices.

2. Recruiting: As the growth continues, making sure you get the right people on board is paramount, and a good investment partner can attract great talent.

3. Partners: We've done a great job building relationships with the likes of SAP, Oracle and IBM, but there's a lot more opportunity out there. Sequoia not only knows the right people, but is well-connected to the rapidly changing needs of those potential partners.

4. Mgmt assistance: We've got a great management team in place, but having such a stellar set of coaches helping you out makes a big difference. These folks have seen these challenges many times before, but are still open to creativity and not treating the business plan as a formula.

5. Advisors/board: As we build out the board and advisory board, they can help think through and attract the right folks.

6. Guidance: If we ultimately decide to take the company public, or if the company were to get acquired some day (not in the plans), these guys are the ones we want to have in our corner.

What will change?

Not much. We still have the same values and team. We're still laser focused on solving business problems and creating value for our customers. We've proven that we can grow this business profitably, so there's no "shoot the management team" attitude that a lot of VC's have. And we're still looking very hard for great team members.

What this does mean is that we're going to get a lot more focused on the long-term goal of winning the market, as well as building out the infrastructure to support our rapidly growing customer base. This means investing in international offices (where we already have a lot of customers), building out the infrastructure for support and sales, adding much needed engineers to our R&D team and building out the marketing to make sure we're continuing to meet our customers' demands.

Was it a hard choice?

Definitely. We are proud of our heritage as a bootstrapped company. It's helped to shape a culture of discipline and customer focus, and it's always fun to say that we never raised a dime. Plus, there's a few folks in this office that are a bit suspicious of VC's. And for good reason - there's a lot of bad ones out there who destroy companies in the name of selfish interests or bad management. But this situation is different for several reasons:

• One VC: not a bunch in the room arguing for their own needs.

• Minority stake: they're along for the ride, not driving the ship.

• Great firm: these guys didn't get where they are by forcing bad decisions.

In short, we couldn't be happier with the outcome. We are ready to take this company to the next level, and look forward to a productive relationship with Sequoia.

For those of you in Portland or the surrounding area, you may want to check out the Putting Collaboration to Work conference. We'll be there along with some product and program management gurus. The event is on June 8th and looks to have some interesting sessions and speakers.

We just released Clearspace 1.0.4 (download, README, changelog). Like version 1.0.3, this is primarily a bug fix release. We fixed 23 bugs and made 6 improvements. Two of the most requested minor improvements were added to the 1.0.4 release, those being the ability to set a global theme, and the ability to completely disable guest access in Clearspace. We are now focused on delivering the external version of Clearspace in the coming month, so keep your eyes peeled.

I'll be giving a quick Clearspace demo at the Under the Radar Conference at the Microsoft campus on March 23. We'll have a little booth there to casually chat or if you'd like to see the demo, stop by the Mercury room from 10:45 to 12:15. We're in the "Team Work" session with our friends Atlassian. 

The conference is filled with a lot of interesting companies doing really smart things. We look forward to learning a lot and meeting as many as possible.