Jive Talks

Jive's Bay Area Office

matt@jivesoftware.com — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 20:02:12 GMT

I'm pleased to report that Jive's Bay Area office is officially open! We're still getting unpacked and the office is definitely still un-finished (note the ugly cubes that were already there). But the Palo Alto location already feels like Jive and is going to be a great place to work. Some of the good and/or interesting highlights so far:

Explaining to people that there is in fact commercial space in the Town & Country center (and it's even nice)
Occasionally not being able to tell the difference between Paly High and Stanford students while at Pete's
The same snacks as the Portland office (including Red Bull and beer) -- definitely helps with the late-night coding sessions
The office "running club", which consists of me and Angela until we can hire more people that like running.

Why Palo Alto?

We're expanding our engineering team and looking for great people in the Bay (and Portland!). If you're passionate about social software and building incredible products for the world's biggest companies then we hope you'll reach out. You'll be joining the growing group in Palo Alto and the larger Jive team that's leading the social business software revolution. Please check out the job reqs for application information or drop me an email or DM.

Ben Kiker Joins as Jive's CMO

communities@jivesoftware.com — Tue, 19 May 2009 21:46:06 GMT

When I first interviewed Ben a few months ago, it only took a few minutes before I was trying to sign him up. Finding a good marketing exec is one of the toughest challenges out there -- very few people have the gift to bring big ideas together with an execution mindset, the ability to build a category while working closely with the field, partners and customers; and most importantly, a talent for making the people around them better. In short, Ben is a hugely talented leader who brings the energy and focus needed to put more distance between us and the competition in the Social Business Software (SBS) category.

Ben will be responsible for Jive's global marketing strategy, in addition to spearheading strategic partnerships and corporate development activities. He is joining us at a pivotal time in our evolution where, despite the brutal economy, we continue to post record-breaking quarters and demonstrate market momentum. Ben's track record in scaling companies for growth and success, and capitalizing on unique opportunities, is going to be pivotal in our strategy.

Before joining Jive, Ben was the Chief Marketing Officer for Interwoven, one of the fastest growing companies in the web content optimization market, through their recent acquisition by Autonomy. He has also held executive management positions for technology leaders including Siebel Systems, Onyx Software, and Clarify (where he worked alongside fellow executive Tony Zingale, now a Jive Board member). In addition, Ben has led product marketing, corporate marketing, field marketing, and partner teams for both emerging companies as well as billion-dollar organizations, and has been very closely involved with the industry analysts. You can learn more about his credentials on LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/pub/ben-kiker/0/167/7a4).

You'll be hearing more from Ben soon (he'll have a blog shortly) as we get him ramped up!

Enterprise Cloud Computing: Announcing Jive Express

matt@jivesoftware.com — Mon, 04 May 2009 16:38:49 GMT

Today we launched Jive Express, a cloud service that lets enterprise business users get up and running with social business software within minutes. The cost is $3 a user/month and we're making the first three months or 100 users free for qualified companies. Departments and cross-company teams have never had such easy access to a collaborative social software product this powerful. It's the same incredibly rich platform that underlies our Jive SBS product along with features specifically targeted for teams like the success dashboard pictured at right. (Want to know how Jive Express stacks up to our full-blown Jive SBS platform? See the quick matrix). Other than being jazzed about the product and the fact that I got to be on the team at Jive that built it, I'm also excited about our first foray into cloud computing and the strategy we're building around it.

How is Jive approaching the cloud? We believe large organizations will embrace the cloud but that it will be a multi-year process. We want to be there to help with the transition in a pragmatic, realistic way. In the short-term, that means making it easy to transistion on and off the cloud using our single tenant architecture (see my last blog for more on single tenant cloud apps). We've used virtualization to drive amazing levels of cost efficiency while providing maximum security and data isolation. We know that enterprise companies are still in the intial stages of cloud adoption, so we're making it very easy to start there but then move to on-premise or to our more traditional hosted environment as the implementation scales. This hybrid approach is unique and we believe it's the best approach for enterprise cloud adoption. To implement all of this, we chose Amazon's AWS service as the backend cloud provider. Working with them has been a fantastic experience so far and they seem to be well on their way to solving many of the enterprise cloud concerns around security and compliance.

I plan to blog a lot more details about how we built the Jive Express service as well as our ongoing cloud ventures in the future. Also check out my interview with whurley at Infoworld for more details. In the meantime, be sure to check out the Jive Express site and signup.

Jive had its best quarter. Ever.

communities@jivesoftware.com — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 17:06:04 GMT

You may have seen my recent blog post on Jive's New York Times article (a lot of former schoolmates did apparently as I got deluged on Facebook about the tattoo). In addition to the tattoo, I also mentioned that we had "one of our biggest quarters ever and we have never been stronger." Now that the books are officially closed, let me expand on it:

We had our best sales quarter in the history of the company.
We were cash flow positive (for the second quarter in a row).
We signed up 70 new customers.
We expanded our Bay Area presence with a new office in Palo Alto.
Over 100% year-over-year revenue growth.

I don't want all my blogs to be "rah rah" regurgitated press releases, but I do want to share how thrilled I am with our team and with what we were able to accomplish. It was a Herculean effort to have our biggest product release ever with SBS and to add such a huge roster of great, forward-thinking clients, all in the context of the worst downturn we have seen.

No new tattoos for this quarter's results, but I'm all ears on ideas to celebrate future quarters.

Thanks for your continued support.

Can single-tenant work for enterprise SaaS?

matt@jivesoftware.com — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 09:18:44 GMT

I spend a lot of time working on Jive's enterprise SaaS offerings. There's one question in particular we've invested quite a bit of engineering time in answering recently -- is it possible to leverage the cloud to build a scalable SaaS solution using a single tenant architecture? It's not so long ago that it felt embarrassing to say the words "Saas" and " single-tenant" in the same sentence. For years, it's been an industry mantra that it's simply impossible to have a scalable Saas business without multi-tenancy. But recent technology advances have eroded the multi-tenant advantage. And especially for the enterprise, there are important reasons why single-tenancy can actually be a better solution. I don't intend to start a flame-war over which approach is ultimately better, but I offer the top reasons my single-tenant shame is passing:

Cloud computing is changing the game. Cloud computing is anchored on virtuatlization and new levels of automation via api-based resource allocation. It's now possible to approach multi-tenant level cost efficiency with a single-tenant application. Although the cloud isn't ready for all Enterprise use-cases (due to security and compliance concerns), cloud computing is maturing very quickly.
Data isolation. Most multi-tenant applications use a single database to store all customer data. That means application bugs can put your data at risk by making it visible to other companies in the same SaaS environment. We use a separate database for each customer in addition to all the advanced data security features baked into the product, which provides much better isolation for critical data.
Migration. SaaS offers fast setup and a fantastic TCO. But current enterprise security and compliance polices around storing corporate data in the cloud can be too high of a hurdle to overcome as product usage expands from a single department to the whole organization. Because of our single-tenant architecture, we're able to offer the same product via SaaS or on-premise. Plus we make it really easy to move from one environment to the other. We believe it's the pragmatic approach, and the one best suited for enterprise.
Customization. One of our key selling points for public-facing communities is the ability to closely match an existing site's look and feel. Most multi-tenant applications end up looking cookie-cutter with just a few color changes. Jive offers much deeper levels of flexibility.

In an upcoming blog entry, I'll share further details about how we're leveraging the cloud including how we're using XMPP.

Jive in the New York Times

communities@jivesoftware.com — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 00:33:20 GMT

There is no question that this is one of the toughest economic downturns in history. Luckily, Jive has been blessed with success and has been able to stay a step ahead of the recession. As we head into of the second quarter of 2009, we are riding in from one of our biggest quarters ever and we have never been stronger.

And it always helps to have press to help drive home that point. Today the New York Times published an article outlining how we got to this point. "Start-Up Gets Course in Survival " discusses the steps we've taken to stay healthy and competitive in this economy, with guidance from our funding partner Sequoia Capital:

The changes that Jive has made since the Sequoia meeting illustrate the ways in which young technology companies have trimmed costs and narrowed their focus in an effort to stay alive. “Jive is the poster child. They nailed it,” Jim Goetz, the Sequoia partner who is on Jive’s board, told The Times. In the quarter ended in March, Jive booked higher revenue than any quarter in its history, and it plans to start hiring again.

It's a great piece. My only complaint was that I wasn't a huge fan of the "near tears" line . "Sincere" would have been much better for my ego. Also, I don't think it captured the impact of our original leadership team and how critical they were to our success as a company. This company was built on the strength of some great individuals and while it's easy for a story to position it as "not scaling", the truth is a much richer tapestry. We went through a transition and in some cases it's better to bring different people with different backgrounds to help that transition. But I stand by our original team as a solid group of dedicated individuals -- it was a tough transition and we wouldn't be who we are without those folks.

Jive Partners Rock!!!

communities@jivesoftware.com — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 15:11:00 GMT

Any successful software company doesn’t try to “take the hill” alone. Partnerships are critical to growing faster, smarter, and most importantly, delivering the best results for Jive’s customers. We have a ton of talented, creative, intelligent people, but our SBS leadership would not have been possible without our valued partners.

These partnerships can take on many shapes and forms, including:

Technology Partners who enable us to extend the capabilities of our product to provide the most feature rich offering on the market.
System Integrators who understand Jive’s product thoroughly and deliver successful projects.
Agencies and Strategic Consultants who provide Social Business Software guidance and complement our own Strategy Practice.
Jive Resellers who have relationships in markets and verticals that expand the reach of our own sales team.
OEM Partners who embed Jive within their products to provide their customers with more extensive offerings.
Government Experts and International Partners who help us navigate these growing market opportunities.
Our Customers, who we have always viewed as our partners,thatleverage their experience in their own domains, as well as their experience with Jive’s products, to create incredible solutions that can be shared with the market.

The best thing about our partners is their approach to servicing customers. I come from an old school consulting background early in my career and many times the approach there is to play defense when attacking a problem. Figuring a way not to fail vs. figuring out a way to do something legendary. One of the greatest things about Jive is working with people who have the desire to be legendary. Our partners share that approach.

I always tell customers and partners from the outset that no relationship is perfect all the time…just ask Mrs. Brown. It’s about being able to work together, to disagree and work through that disagreement, to realize it’s not about winning, but about winning together for mutual success, that really produces those legendary results.

There are too many partners worthy of recognition to single them out here by name -- I would be fearful of an oversight and thus not giving them their deserved credit. Going forward I will blog here about specific examples of our partners accomplishments and the success stories they have created. In the meantime, here is a list of recent news about our partnerships.

Suffice to say, we appreciate and value our partner ecosystem and look forward to growing those relationships and developing others.

Jive Partners truly rock!

Making Sense of Clearspace and Jive Social Business Software (SBS)

chris.morace@jivesoftware.com — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 15:33:31 GMT

The last few weeks have been pretty exciting for Jive. We received a lot of very positive press and analyst coverage around our announcement of Jive SBS 3.0, including ZDNet, CNET, VentureBeat, Aberdeen Group, and many more. There was also a tremendous amount of chatter in the Twittersphere. Much of the Twitter chatter has been trying to make sense of how our historical products Clearspace & Clearspace Community fit into the Jive SBS 3.0 paradigm:

The History of Clearspace & Clearspace Community

For those of you familiar with our products, Clearspace was launched in February 2007 as one of the first fully integrated social suites addressing the needs of employee communities. Clearspace Community was launched in May of the same year and focused on Customer & Partner communities outside of the firewall. Jive was the only company who recognized from the beginning that addressing the needs of social software for the enterprise had to include employees, customer, and partners.

Two years later we’ve had some tremendous success with these products and added well over 600 customers to our already substantial customer base with global brands usch as Intel, Nike, CNN iReport, United Business Media, SAP, and NetApp. We’ve seen strong uptake in almost every vertical including finance, manufacturing, retail, technology, government, education, and services. The most interesting thing is that some of our earliest customers now have tens of communities, and over a quarter of them have more than 2 communities. As you might imagine this has created the strong desire to unify the user experience across these communities, and subjects like federation and bridging have become very common place, but I will dive into that topic in a future blog.

The Foundation of Social Business Software

If you took all of the product that we have sold to date, it would fit into the blue layer of the Jive SBS architecture pictured above. Clearspace is now referred to as an Employee Marketplace. And a Clearspace Community instance is called a Public Marketplace. These Employee & Public Marketplaces are now collectively referred to as Jive Foundation. Why? Because they are the foundation on top of which we deliver our solution-focused Modules and Centers. In order to purchase a Module or a Center you must have at least one foundational product in place. This social layer is extremely important, provides a tremendous amount of value in its own right, and ultimately is what distinguishes Social Business Software from the more transaction and process oriented enterprise software that has become so familiar. But, it is applying the power of social software to specific, understood challenges in the enterprise that provides hard ROI and clear value--this is where the introduction of the Centers truly changes the game.

But Wait! I’ve Got Questions!

You’re not alone. As with any transformation there is a lot of change, and change can be confusing. Here are the questions I’ve been getting most often over the last couple of weeks:

With the introduction of modules, are you removing functionality from the Foundation?

Absolutely not. An example would be the analytics dashboard related to basic user information and system information in the Admin Console of the Foundation products. The addition of the powerful social analytics in our Analytics & Insight modules will complement these views and information, and not be redundant or conflict with them in any way. Nothing is being removed from the Foundation or any of the products that our customers currently have in place.

With the addition of so many new offerings does that mean you are going to put the Foundation products into maintenance mode?

Definitely not. Jive has product management and engineering resource focused exclusively to the Foundation. We intend to improve upon our leadership position in terms of social capabilities. In fact, we intend to move more aggressively here than ever before. Over the next several releases you will see us continue to unify the different modes of social communication into a single usable experience. There will see dramatic improvements and innovation around social discovery, noise reduction, and actionability. The Foundation will continue to be a critical part of our roadmap and strategy going forward.
Is Jive SBS just Clearspace with a new name?

Hopefully the answer to this is now clear. Clearspace is now an Employee Marketplace that is part of Jive Foundation, which is one layer of the Jive SBS architecture. Modules and Centers are new offerings that are additional to the foundation products and dependent on at least one of the Marketplaces being in place.
I really like the Clearspace name and logo. Why did they have to go?

Before answering this, I will say that we love them too. Spark, Forums, Clearspace, and Clearspace Community all had fantastic names & logos. I’ve often joked that there are startups that would kill for names and branding as good as these products. But, change is a natural part of growth and maturity, and worked very well for Jive at one time is no longer as good of a fit.

For those of you in the enterprise software space, you know that it is very difficult to build and develop more than one brand. When I go into our customers they collectively refer to our software as “Jive” no matter which products they are using. (Even if it is our older Forums product.) More importantly, these product brands were not helping our customers and prospects conceptualize the solution that Jive brings to market with our Social Business Software focus. While there is a firm belief that this is the right decision for Jive and our customers, we’ll always have a nostalgic place in our hearts for the Clearspace name.

The Best is Still Ahead

We’re really excited about our new direction with Jive Social Business Software, and there is a lot more to talk about. Dave started laying out some of what the Modules and Centers are going to mean to our customers in his blog post (http://www.jivesoftware.com/jivespace/blogs/jivetalks/2009/03/10/welcome-to-the-social-business-revolution--introducing-jive-sbs-30). I hope to go a bit deeper in some follow-on posts. Admittedly, it is early and the cynical may dismiss this move as pure marketing or hand waving. But, I’m willing to predict that the skeptics will fall silent over time. The module offerings were strongly pulled by our customers and will have an incredible amount of uptake. Our solution focused Centers strategy was not created on a whiteboard, but from a deep assessment of the way our customers are actually using our products. All we are doing is making their experience easier, cleaner, and more powerful by productizing and packaging our software in a way that provides clear solutions to large business problems.

Changes at Jive

communities@jivesoftware.com — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 16:03:32 GMT

So far, 2009 has been the best year for Jive that I can remember. Our launch of Jive SBS 3.0 was hugely successful, the product has a huge and compelling set of features, and SBS as a category (http://www.jivesoftware.com/jivespace/blogs/jivetalks/2009/03/10/welcome-to-the-social-business-revolution--introducing-jive-sbs-30) is expanding faster than we imagined. Every member of the Jive team has pulled more than their weight the past few months and it's been a joy to work with such a solid team. It's also clear that we're on the other side of a big company transition -- what I like to think of as going from a ‘big small company’ to a ‘small big company’. It's exactly what we needed to go through as an organization, but with this transition comes change. And one of the tougher transitions for me will be saying goodbye to our Chief Marketing Officer, Sam Lawrence, who is leaving Jive at the end of this month.

Sam is a great friend and a great marketer. He was an instrumental part of moving this company from a small technology vendor to the category leader - from the initial Clearspace direction to developing creative ways to evangelize this new space.

I am going to miss Sam - not just what he's done for Jive, but who he is. His sense of humor and loyalty are unmatched. He has helped in making Jive's first chapter memorable and enjoyable. I'll let Sam talk about what's next for him on his blog, but he'll rock it for sure.

In the meantime, Jive is actively refilling the CMO position and will make an announcement once it is filled.

Welcome to the Social Business Revolution - Introducing Jive SBS 3.0

communities@jivesoftware.com — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 05:03:15 GMT

I've spent a healthy portion of the last month on the road talking to analysts and press about our new release, and it's been one of the most thoroughly enjoyable times I've had as a CEO. Not only is the release packed full of amazing things to talk about, but it's also clear that our vision is closely aligned to that of the analysts and the press, and that this vision is playing out daily with our customers.

The Backdrop

Since we started Jive, we've watched as social computing has changed the lives of over a billion individuals. And we have pushed hard on bringing this revolution to the workplace. And in the last few years, we have seen first-hand how Social Business Software (SBS) can create a marketplace of ideas where people, projects and priorities come together to harness everybody's knowledge, ability and creativity to produce a new asset called social capital. And we have seen how it can create breakthrough returns in the process.

For our customers, SBS is the new enterprise category. The enterprise has been devoid of a new application category since CRM, and they see the advent of social software as the biggest change to happen to the enterprise in fifteen years. It's now spanning every major vertical and the visionary leaders are seeing the gains that can be made by opening up collaboration and focusing on the people. This is especially true in a downturn, where throwing more money at business process software is not going to lead to huge value increases -- you have to look to the areas where there is the most to gain, the white spaces in a company: the people.

Right now, it's too hard, takes too long and costs too much. People spend twenty hours a week managing emails or stuck in meetings. For the company that wants to show huge changes in the input/output equation, you have to think big. You have to think about changing the way you work. The smart companies are already doing it, and they're already seeing the results.

Introducing Jive SBS

What's Important:

1. The Four Centers: The biggest change for the company as a whole is a complete reorganization of our go-to-market strategy around business value -- what we call the four "Centers". Having seen what works and what doesn't, we chose to align ourselves with the transformational business outcomes we know we can produce, and the full sales & services team / product / partnerships and vision to ensure we make our customers successful.

Employee Engagement: Allows employees to get their heads above their cubicles (metaphorically) to see that they are part of a much bigger network of people, and to use this network to dramatically improve their productivity by accessing the best ideas and resources across the entire organization.
Marketing & Sales: Creates awareness, builds leads and maintains a deep and meaningful conversation with customers, and allows sales and marketing organizations to share information, news and connections quickly and easily.
Innovation / R&D: Allows inovation teams to solicit and evaluate ideas and opportunities from customers, partners and employees and reduce time to market dramatically.
Support: Improves the quality and speed of support agent response by providing a turnkey way to access, monitor, archive and connect the appropriate internal or external expertise with the issue at hand.

2. Bridging: Early on we made a strategic decision that customers, partners and employees all needed to be part of SBS -- just focusing on customer communities or behind-the-firewall employee collaboration was a not a long term solution, and our customers (very vocally) backed this up. The power of SBS is that it leverages the collective power of a huge group of people. And in this era, the successful companies are ones that can facilitate that "big conversation" and produce the best decisions and outcomes, which requires including your customers and partners. In this release we our thrilled to have our first push at bridging the gap between different communities, allowing employees to see what customers are saying and to start building a deeper relationship with them.

3. Analytics and Insights: Measuring the success of SBS rollouts is critical. This latest release not only offers an incredibly rich analytics module with out of the box reports and a full data warehouse solution to drive the metrics that matter most to your business, but also a full Insights module that reports on the sentiment and engagement of your marketplace (and even other outside public communities). You can think of it like this: the Analytics module measures what people are doing, the Insights piece manages what they are thinking.

The Insights module is done through a partnership with Networked Insights and is a very powerful tool. You have to check out a demo if you have a chance.

4. Video: Essentially a YouTube for your SBS rollout, the video module allows all the main video formats to be quickly uploaded and available as a first class content type, with all the security, performance and scaling the enterprise needs.

5. Bookmarking: Track what's important through social filtering of content.

What about Clearspace?

Clearspace as a product is fully represented in the Foundation layer above. The core product and architecture has largely remained the same, but we have removed the name Clearspace. Ultimately it was creating brand confusion with the name Jive, and we had to make the call. As much as we loved the name, we had to move on to the next stage of our development as a product and a company.

Now Business is Social

We have put a ton of work into this release and we couldn't be more thrilled. SBS is growing up quickly, and it's proving to be what companies need in this time of uncertainty. Please join us for a live webcast with Nike, Cisco, and Forrester to see how SBSis changing the way work gets done in the enterprise.

New SVP of Sales, Board Member, Forrester Wave and Scoble video

communities@jivesoftware.com — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 06:07:22 GMT

We just finished up one of our best quarters ever, and 2009 is kicking off with a bang. A few very noteworthy items to share with you.

First and most importantly, we formally announced that John McCracken has joined Jive as Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales and that Bill Lanfri has joined the Board of Directors. John is a hugely talented sales leader who has worked with most of our other execs during his time at Mercury (as well as Tony Zingale on our board, the former CEO of Mercury). Bill Lanfri is a very seasoned leader who has seen the technology growth curve many times, and has already made a big impact as an advisor. Both have the experience we need to continue building Jive into a great company and I'm thrilled to have them on board.

Secondly, this past Friday Forrester Research released its WAVE report on Community Platforms. We are excited to be named a leader in the space and we encourage you to read the full report if you're a Forrester client. Jeremiah Owyang, senior analyst at Forrester, is thorough and insightful. It’s an honor to be included with the other vendors and the report is a feather in the cap for the Social Business Software market.

Also worth noting, in the first week of January, Jive’s CMO Sam Lawrence, sat down with Robert Scoble and talked a bit about the company’s plans for the year. He provides a great overview of Social Business Software and really captured the essence of what Jive is working to accomplish. Sam also gives a few hints about what you can expect from Jive in Q1.

All in all, a great start to the year. But there's more to come soon.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Jive Positioned in the Visionaries Quadrant of the 2008 Magic Quadrant for Social Software

communities@jivesoftware.com — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 00:10:12 GMT

Great news for our space. Gartner, Inc. just released the 2008 Magic Quadrant for Social Software. In the latest report, we are positioned in the Visionaries Quadrant. Gartner, Inc. defines companies in this quadrant as follows:

"Visionaries in the market demonstrate a strong understanding of current and future market trends and directions, such as the importance of a flexible and transparent collaboration environment, as well as the value of mutual reinforcement between tools that encourage user contribution and tools that encourage bottom-up group and structure formation. Their products and product road maps display a penchant for innovation, especially in terms of architecture and lightweight integration, while their marketing and R&D efforts are boosted by their alignment with the opensource "ecosystem." The Visionaries in this market have not exhibited the scope of delivery of the Challengers, but have demonstrated vision across a range of capabilities."

--Nikos Drakas, Gartner, Inc., 2008 Social Software Magic Quadrant

If you want to read the full report, you can access it here, compliments of Jive.

We believe that Jive's growth and recognition from Gartner proves that there is a transformative power in community-based collaboration and it really is changing the way companies work. Collaboration continues to be a major area of enterprise investment and, in addition to new customers, we've also seen a lot of growth with existing customers as they add more of their employee base onto Jive's Clearspace application.

About the Magic Quadrant:
The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted October 2008 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the "Leaders" quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

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.

Best business hook-up hotspot: Clearstep

communities@jivesoftware.com — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 17:15:38 GMT

Ever wish you could find someone working on social media or Enterprise 2.0 efforts at other companies, same as you? Wish you could pick their brain about how the heck they justified the implementation cost? Found that elusive ROI? Tricks to get employees to use it? Best way to communicate your new online community to your brand fanbase?

Ever wish you could do this without all of we pesky software vendors trying to market to you the whole time?

Well, now you can.

Jive Software (your favorite pesky software vendor) is proud to announce the new Clearstep business community (register today - it's free!).

There's already quite a bit of activity in Clearstep. It's segmented into two areas:

Online Communities

Build, manage, and measure your community successfully

Social media folks focused on external-facing communities will be most interested in these discussions, tips and tricks. Current hot topics include (requires registration):

Engagement with Social Media: Personal vs. Business purposes?

Why Most Online Communities Fail

Recommendations for human moderation vendor?

What are community metrics that you measure?

Internal Collaboration

Discover best practices in leveraging enterprise social software

Enterprise 2.0 advocates focused on internal social networking and collaboration will be most interested in this area. Current hot topics include:

Do reputation points help or hurt?

What's your Governance Model Look Like?

Enterprise 2.0 Use Cases

How do you select your pilot groups?

Want to know the best part about this community? It is completely vendor-agnostic. That's right. There are folks discussing solutions from Microsoft, Jive (obviously), IBM, Atlassian, etc. The community managers are absolutely committed to keeping this place vendor-agnostic and marketing-free so that the truly valuable conversations can be had.

And last I checked, the majority of participants work at very recognizable Fortune 500 companies.

Makes you wonder if the old customer reference requests are a thing of the past. You can now just participate in Clearstep, and ask your peers yourself.

Clearspace 2.5 - and more - is just around the corner

communities@jivesoftware.com — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 21:29:19 GMT

Our software engineers have been diligently working on Jive Clearspace 2.5 (formerly known as 2.1) over the past several weeks, and we've been putting it through its paces inside Jive. Many have blogged and videoed (?) about it:

Sneak @ one super-tiny Clearspace 2.5 feature

Does your wiki have the Q&A blues?

One other thing we've been working on is the brand-new, not-even-announced-yet, Clearstep business community. This community is already rockin' with both Jive and non-Jive customers. They're sharing good and bad practices about implementing social software inside their organizations. They're sharing about how to roll out thriving online communities, too. The best thing about that community is that it's designed to be vendor-agnostic.

For me, though, I'm most excited about something we'll be offering our customers starting in August, as part of pilot engagements. We will go beyond the software, and really tackle the hard part of any social software implementation: user adoption.

You see, Jive created a cross-functional research team back in April 2008. They visited ten of our largest F500 customers to figure out what was working and what wasn't with their internal Clearspace deployments. They spoke to over 100 business professionals at the executive, mid-level management, and end user levels, and brought back what became over 100 pages of raw, qualitative data (I'm on page 56 at the moment).

The resulting report, which we gave to those customers who participated, highlighted some very compelling patterns across every organization. One of them was that much help was needed to figure out good practices for getting more people to "migrate" their work behavior to be more transparent and sharing.

Now, the next "version" of that research team (that would be Derek DeMoro and I) have put together what we hope is an answer to those needs:

This program is still being formulated, but watch for more information about it and about Jive Clearspace 2.5 very soon!