We released Clearspace 1.6 last Thursday, and it's got some really nice improvements and new features. I'm personally very excited about customizable spaces. This allows space owners to decide what's important in their space and customize the layout of the "Overview" section. We've found that a lot of our customers are using the main space page as their department's front door and they wanted a lot of flexibility around the content and layout. Be sure to check out the main Clearspace page for more info or watch the short video about the feature.
Another minor new feature is the ability to migrate content back and forth between different databases. This was a pretty highly requested feature from customers. We've had a number of people start an evaluation on the embedded database then want to migrate that to a more production ready database. We added a simple page in the admin console which allows administrators to point to another database and transfer the content.
Finally, a bit of a marketing update: we've refreshed the content on the main Clearspace page and also have a dedicated page up for ClearspaceX, the external community version of Clearspace. Oh, and anyone notice the changes to our front page? 
I participated in an Enterprise Collaboration panel with SAP, Oracle, BEA, Zimbra and Sony. It was a bit high-level but I tried to reinforce the importance of keeping collaboration focused on productivity. You can watch the video of it and the rest of the conference thanks to coverage by Veodia.
We also participated in the demo tracks. Ismael asked that we have our customers demo our software so we invited Intel and Attensa who both gave great demos of how they're using Clearspace and Clearspace X. Check out the video of Attensa's presentation (slides above) on how they're using Clearspace internally and the sort of impact it's made to their company (like the 31% reduction in email). Intel's video does an excellent job articulating their goals and the short term impact Clearspace X has had for them.
The best part of the conference was how many of the discussions recognized the need for true enterprise-class collaboration software that recognized the needs, challenges and reality-based technical environment that large companies deal with everyday. I remember one person at our booth saying, "you mean you make 'real' software that companies can actually use behind their firewall?!"
We were happy to learn that the Computing Technology Association (CompTIA)the leading trade association for the world's IT industryawarded Clearspace with the Software Innovation Award for " Most Innovative General Business Software."
This is Clearspace's first award and it's from an organization we really like, too. David Sommer, head of Software CEO and vice president, e-business and software solutions for CompTA, said that Jive was "definitely right in a very sweet spot with an incredibly hot solution set that I believe is right on the money." Congrats to the Clearspace team and all our Clearspace customers!
Whenever an engineer has a little time they can grab an M&M (no cherry picking), then attach it to the M&M board and implement it. Here is a shot of the M&M board just after installation:
This week Aaron Johnson, the big developer brain behind the blogging (and way more) parts of Clearspace and I are headed up to Seattle for Gnomedex, "The Blogosphere's Conference." The conference bills itself as an interesting "crossroads between producers and observers, between users and developers." I like the fact that everyone attends the same, single track and that they've thought about solving the annoying aspects of most technology conferences, like that there's never a place to plug your laptop into and that your wifi is spotty at best. I hope to hear some new ideas and meet some new people.
Clearspace 1.4 was released yesterday and includes two great new features. First up is a Popular Content section included in each space that highlights the most viewed and commented content at a glance. This feature helps people find the most useful content quickly when they are new to a space.
The second new feature shows a list of people with similar profiles on each user's profile page.
There were also a huge number of bug fixes. See the full changelog for the details.
Back in April, I blogged about how we were adopting a release train model for our Open Source projects. Since then, we've rolled out the same process to our commercial products Clearspace and Jive Forums. The release train is a fairly fundamental departure from how we've done releases in the past, so we wanted to provide more details about exactly how it works.
Why did we make a switch in how we build our software? There were many motivating factors, but the general theme is "move as fast as possible with high quality". For end users of our products, the key thing to know is that there will be a new release every three weeks. Each version contains bug fixes and new features and we're committed to maintaining high quality for every release (no more rushed bug fixes a week after a release). The graphic below illustrates how this process works:
Each release (from top to bottom of the graphic) takes a total of nine weeks: three weeks of planning, three weeks of development, and three weeks of QA. All three processes run in parallel, which leads to the three week release cycle.
Answers to common questions:
Q: Do we expect customers to upgrade every three weeks?
A: No, that's unreasonable in most environments. We've made it as easy to do upgrades as possible, and we hope you'll upgrade at least once per quarter to take advantage of all the great changes. When you do upgrade, the release train process will help ensure you're on high quality code.
Q: How will version numbers work?
A: Each release will get a minor version number: 1.5, 1.6., 1.7, etc. Major version numbers will change approximately once per year.
Q: How will you develop major new features that take more than three weeks?
A: Good question. No model is perfect and we're already working on new features that will take more than one train cycle to fully finish. In those cases, we're breaking the projects into milestones and using code branches as necessary.
Other Release Train Fun
The release train has had a deeper cultural impact than just being a way that we engineer our software. The marketing team now times a lot of their work on the train, and even our major happy hours are now on the three week cycle. Late afternoon of every third Friday, we gather the company for a demo of the new features and then adjourn for partying.
Time will tell how well this new process works, but we're excited about it and the results so far are promising.
