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.

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:

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.

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.

Register today!

This this is going to not only be fun and action-packed, it's going to be informative to boot. Packed with answers and lively challenges, Social Software Jeopardy is a one-time special online event. So far over 500 people have signed up. It's this Wednesday, May 28th. Register now if you want to join us. And no, that's not my real mustache.

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:

  We recently saw our Openfire downloads counter hit seven digits worth of downloads. The Openfire project is close to my heart and I first want to extend a sincere congratulations to my incredible team for developing the project into one that has hit 1 million downloads.   Now the family of Ignite Realtime products have hit a collective download total of 3 million. The actual number of downloads is far greater because many of the Ignite products are now included in Linux distributions and are available for download from other sources. We are extremely pleased with the success of these projects and look forward to watching them grow more in the future.

I wanted to pull together numbers to provide some perspective for how significant these download numbers are. The only public number available for the other jabber servers was from ejabberd who is reporting around 160K downloads.

Openfire's ease of use and deep feature set is what's driving the downloads and installs. Here's how the Openfire features stack up vs. the others listed on jabber.org.

Daniel posted about our milestone on the Ignite Realtime community, where one of our community members, Vchat20, had this to say:

Really you guys have a product that greatly stands out here. Granted, apps such as ejabberd for a flagship example have their place, but openfire is in its own class. Makes it TONS easier to configure a jabber system without having to bother digging into xml files and configuring everything from the ground up, has plenty of enterprise-class functionality, modular, and, of course, completely open.

 

Keep up the work on an awesome app guys.

Great work everybody and thank you to our Ignite Realtime community for all of your support! If you would like to play with our popular realtime communication software, you can download them here:

• Openfire (beta of new version just released)

• Spark

• Smack

• XIFF