Hi Larry,

Your timing is impeccable

Currently in Jive SBS, there is no concept of creating a discussion and keeping it limited to specific people, but it's something we're in the process of exploring.

Using our current SBS Discussion construct, we want to allow people to maintain focused discussions with others and keep access to a few key people (specified by the discussion author). Note the addition of "Add People" near the bottom of the discussion creation form in this early comp:

In this comp, I have added Nick, Aaron, and all of my connections that I have labeled with the name "Design Folk" (the type-ahead user picker will search connection labels as well as users).

On a related note, we're thinking about ways to do the same thing with SBS documents:

This new functionality would allow users the option to control who sees differing types of their content (document shown) in SBS, by specifying the audience. Co-authorship options are retained in "Collaborations Options".

Does this approach address your question? Does the interface make sense to you? Got suggestions?

Any feedback is helpful, good or bad.

Thanks!

That's a good observation, and we're sensitive to it.

We've heard some concerns that private content belies the concept of collaboration, and that inaccessible content does little to foster peoples' interactions around it. But, in offline office situations, focused side discussions like this are critical to productivity and are a natural part of team dynamics. So, there's a lot to consider there.

In the end, we figure the benefit outweighs the risk, and by adding the ability to disable this functionality from the admin console, are providing a way to offer this feature with little risk.

Thanks much for your feedback!