Press Release
Jive Software Transforms Business Communication with New Collaboration Tool
Clearspace Brings Web 2.0 to the Enterprise; Enables Teams to Communicate, Create Content and Share Expertise
PORTLAND, Ore., February 7, 2007 - Jive Software announces the launch of Clearspace, the first enterprise-class collaboration application to combine the latest content creation tools with community-driven intelligence.
By presenting Web 2.0 communication tools in an intuitive and unified way, Clearspace motivates internal teams to share documents, post and read blogs and wikis, and engage in forum discussions. Collaboration and knowledge sharing are also encouraged through the use of tagging, workflow, user rewards, and RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feeds.
"Clearspace resulted from year-long conversations with some of the world's most innovative companies about solving the age-old collaboration issues in new and creative ways," said Dave Hersh, Jive Software's CEO. "Companies have told us that they're tired of cobbled-together point solutions that perpetuate redundancy and closed teamwork. With Clearspace, users are rewarded for creating value and enterprises are rewarded with significant increases in productivity."
Clearspace creates a unified collaboration space that's accessible via the Web anytime, anywhere. Users value it because it's uniquely user-friendly, while management and IT value it because of its open architecture that can be customized, integrated or scaled to huge numbers of users.
"Clearspace delivered remarkable value to us off the bat by giving NAPHIT's core members and nationwide personnel a centralized location to securely share information critical to the success of our health department initiatives," said Ginny Hare DeCuir, Communications Director for the NAPHIT (National Association for Public Health Information Technology). "Clearspace is loaded with intuitive and useful features, and we've particularly benefited from the ability to capture conversations - which we'd otherwise have by email - in a Clearspace discussion thread that resides in one location and can be easily referenced."
Clearspace users can work together using collaborative wiki documents or binary documents (such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF documents) that are managed through versioning and workflow. Real-time notification capabilities allow users to see who is currently editing a document, as well as when they have finished and released it.
Clearspace users can also connect through discussion threads and blogs, and they can be kept abreast of recent content additions via email, instant message alerts and RSS feeds. Integration with email means users can contribute through email, and not have to learn a new application to participate in Clearspace.
"We're starting to see Web 2.0 applications emerge with a bonafide business proposition of encouraging collaboration and community building among individuals and teams," said Mark Levitt, vice president of Collaborative Computing research for IDC. "Clearspace, with its friendly approach, rewards system and productivity benefits, is the type of Web 2.0 solution that employees can use in their daily routines."
Additional Jive Software Clearspace features include:
- Workspaces that can be dynamically configured to include preferred communications tools and users
- Real-time visibility into active users and their current projects
- Ability to edit binary documents like Word and Excel with full versioning, check in/out and approval workflow
- Support of wiki-style markup or WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editing for document editing
- Tagging, or associating keywords with content, allowing for simple searches by topic
- Threaded discussions, with workflow for questions and answers
- Content rating system
- User rewards system
- RSS feeds to aggregate content updates
- Ability to monitor team member participation
- Customizable user interface
- Developer-source, open architecture and easy deployment
- LDAP and Active Directory integration
The Future is Clear
Future enhancements to Jive Software's current Clearspace server are expected to include Web conferencing, deeper real-time functionality, and social networking, among others. Jive Software also plans to roll out an external-facing Clearspace solution in the second quarter of 2007, enabling companies to collaborate efficiently with their customers and partners. Red Hat is one of the first organizations to take advantage of this external collaboration tool, which is currently a beta release.
About Jive Software
Jive Software is an Inc. 500 company that develops award-winning collaboration software that improves business productivity through open collaboration among employees, partners and customers. Jive Software's products, which are open or developer-source, open-architecture and customizable for any business need, power both online real-time and team collaboration for more than 1,600 customers around the world. For more information, visit www.jivesoftware.com or its open-source community at www.igniterealtime.org.
Media Contact: Rachel Petersen, Nectar Communications, Rachel@nectarpr.com, 415-637-0576
###
