Blog Posts From Jive Talks Tagged With office

Making Microsoft and SBS Jive

communities@jivesoftware.com — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 04:26:56 GMT

SBS 4.0 is all about closing the gap between the way business tools MAKE people work and the way we WANT to work. And let’s face it, most of us work within Microsoft Office. Jive recently announced a new content management strategy with Microsoft SharePoint integration as a first step. But for SBS to be adopted broadly in enterprises, that social layer has to reach not only across content silos, but also to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and the like. So we’re going the next step to integrate with Microsoft Office to help its 600 million users be more social.

As part of the 4.0 announcement this morning, we introduced the Jive Connects for Microsoft Office. This a simple plug-in that allows multiple authors and contributors to make comments and changes on an Office file simultaneously with automatic synchronization of each other's changes. When users create and save Office content, it gets published in their Jive activity stream, which invites comments, discussions, and constructive feedback. Before, users would have to upload the file to Jive then individually download it. With the plug-in, that synchronization to Jive occurs directly from Office.

This eliminates two classic headaches:

Version control: one user can work on the graphics of a PowerPoint presentation while another is working on the script and see changes in the file as they happen. Confusion is eliminated because there is only one synchronized version of a document available to users, which also ensures that everyone is working from the same content.
Reply All as your collaboration tool: it eliminates reliance on email to share and review content by providing a unique Jive URL for every saved document that can be accessed by any user with appropriate access. In fact, non-Office users can preview and provide inline comments to any Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint file as well as any PDF.

So for all of us who live in Microsoft Office, things just got a whole lot better.

I'd also like to thank our partner DocVerse who helps power this solution. You can read more at Shan Sinha's blog, DocVerse's CEO.

With the magnitude of the Jive SBS 4.0 release, jive bloggers decided to team up on the news and split it into digestible pieces. In this series of posts, we delve deep into the new mobile tools, bridging public and private realms together, deep Microsoft Office integration, and provide a high level perspective of Jive SBS 4.0.

Dave Hersh on Jive SBS 4.0

David Greenberg on Jive Bridging

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.

Microsoft Office Live Workspace is Fascinating for All the Wrong Reasons

chris.morace@jivesoftware.com — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 16:44:21 GMT

I just got done checking out Microsoft Office Live beta release over lunch and my mind has been spinning on it all afternoon. Not for any of the reasons you might guess. The release is actually quite predictable. It has been hailed with an equally predictable host of reviews criticizing its lack of true innovation in the midst of a Web 2.0 catalyzed collaboration renaissance as well as more courteous reviews from those established enough to know it is good business to be polite to Microsoft.

What has fascinated me about this release is that it illustrates how incredibly difficult it is to break away from an established paradigm of thinking. It brings to mind a story I once read of a British colonial expedition in the northern subarctic regions of Canada. They died from exposure to the elements and were found by some of the local Native Americans who were passing through the area on sleds. This sounds like a typical tale of the hazards of 18th century exploration until you learn that the reason they became stuck was that they were trying to take a heavy horse drawn coach further weighted down with heavy trunks through the arctic wilderness. One of the members of the party was of a certain status and they had brought his coach with them across the ocean on the ship. It really makes you wonder if even one among the expedition noticed at some point that the landscape had radically changed from what they knew in England and raised his voice to question whether this de rigueur mode of transportation was still appropriate.

Microsoft Office Live Workspace basically extends the Office paradigm to include web services. It wouldn't be terribly unfair to describe the core of its new functionality as allowing you to save your Word files on a hosted drive that multiple people can access (although admittedly only one at a time with notifications when it's your turn to edit) instead of on your local machine. In their defense, Microsoft’s product managers even admit that this product is “optimized for people who use office everyday”, don't know how to upload a document, and don't want to send it via email. The integration with Outlook is actually pretty slick, but it is held back somewhat from the fact that it only really works completely as designed if you are running a computer with a Microsoft's OS, Microsoft browser, and using the latest office suite.

As an expansion of Office's functionality I think Microsoft Office Live Workspace is a nice improvement and makes the products more flexible. But, in a time when there is so much exciting innovation going on in the collaboration space it is almost painful to see the traditional document management paradigm of Sharepoint married with hosted file storage and called "collaboration". I'm sure our intrepid explorers realized at some point after they stopped making progress that simply calling their coach a sled didn't get it unstuck.

Free office!

communities@jivesoftware.com — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 17:35:56 GMT

Office software hasn't changed in over 20 years

What was your office like 20 years ago? You were probably sitting at your desk jamming to Madonna's "Into the Groove," wearing stone-washed denim and working away on your IBM PS/2 486 MHz computer. Since then, office software has rested atop its "good enough" mountain with no real challengers. Somehow good enough is good enough as long as the checks keep rolling in. Meanwhile, two generations of us have used the same personal inbox, calendar, word processor and spreadsheet to do our work. This has gone on for so long, many of us can't even imagine our workplace framed a different way.

Office software will be free, then included in the OS

Suddenly, companies have a gaggle of "Office" options from folks like Google, Zoho, Thinkfree, Zimbra/Yahoo, Adobe, OpenOffice and a slew of others. But these Microsoft competitors are merely duplicating the Office suite--Google and OpenOffice even give theirs away. The resulting navel-contemplation in the industry often focuses on whether office software's future is based on the web or on the premises, but that focus is misplaced and misses the bigger picture. The spate of knock-offs will devalue this old set of features. Soon, paying for "Office" software will seem as ridiculous as paying for a web browser. Microsoft is painfully aware of this. Rumor has it they are readying the release of a free, limited and ad-supported version of their Office suite.

The current revolution of office software is not a revision of the old one

The picture has quickly expanded past file creation and email sorting. Traditional office software features are being absorbed into browsers and OSes. The next level of digital office work is shifting from a disjointed file exchange work model to one that's much more connected, contextual and collaborative. In the old model, users create documents in isolation and exchange them with other isolated users--all insulated from and out of sync with the bigger picture of relevant interpersonal activity. In the new collaboration model, connected people understand when, what and why to engage and they do it in a unified environment. They use file-sharing only as a supplement, when and if it's necessary. We refer to this collaboration model as Social Productivity, which frames our daily work activity in the "we" vs. "me" context and then delivers new functionality to help with these connections. This more accurately mimics our work-with-others activity vs. the produce-alone-and-distribute part of our daily equation. Now we can get context at a glance, work doesn't disappear once we hit "send," and we stay connected to the efforts most important to us.

The irony of the "Office wars"

There's a lot of speculation about how things will change but the good news is that there will be change. Some of it reminds me of what happened to Netscape. When they broke onto the scene in 1994 with their Navigator web browser, they charged for it and people gladly paid because it was the best (and arguably the only) solution available. Then in the late nineties, Microsoft introduced Internet Explorer--for free. After a very short "browser war," Microsoft integrated their browser into their OS. Netscape lost, but users didn't care. They happily looked past the browser features because the real value wasn't the browser; it was the content within it. Ironically, it is now Microsoft that is set up to stumble on its own shrewd business practices, which could cost them almost 30% of their $40 billion revenue engine. There's always Outlook.

Our office future finally changes

A whole new industry focused on Social Productivity has emerged. The door is open for new market leaders to lead this next wave of innovation. Demand is through the roof for this bigger picture approacha more visible and productive enterprise. All of this is good news for employees and companies. Social Productivity is already producing better results and more quickly than we ever did wearing the blinders of individual contributors. A whole new marketplace is changing the game. Our kids will smile with nostalgia when they think of a digital “document” saved somewhere on a hard driveliterally modeled after a piece of paper--that only one person at a time could access or give to someone else to look over. It already sounds quaint and archaic.