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.

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:

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.

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.

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 … 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.

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.

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.