QA Workflow

Powerful features that motivate quality content

• Escalate Unanswered Questions: If questions go unanswered for a given period of time, experts can be notified via email with a list of the relevant open questions.
• Gauge Workflow Efficiency: Advanced resolution statistics allow you to monitor the efficiency of your question workflow and improve the process.
• Boost Participation with Powerful Reward System: Reward your most active users and experts, and inspire active participation with features like status levels, escalation, points and reward systems.

Connection

Find experts and stay connected no matter where you are

• Locate Experts in your Community: Community members can locate other members by searching through basic information such as name or email address, or perform more complex searches through extended profile fields.
• Tagging: Adds the ability for users to tag messages. These tags aid in the search and navigation of content.
• Contribute to Forums through Email: Users can respond directly to a forum thread through email. Simply hit "reply" to your watch notification email and your message will be posted to the forum without opening a browser window.
• Collaborate in Real-Time with Group Chat Rooms: With integrated group chat and public IM presence information embedded into the forum environment, users can collaborate in a group chat room.

User Interface

Simple to use

• Save as Draft: Draft and Autosave gives forum users the ability to manually save a copy of the post they are currently writing as a 'draft' and also automatically saves a copy of the post in the background as the user is writing a post.
• Wiki Markup: Users now have the option to utilize standard wiki-markup syntax to format their posts.
• Updated UI: Basic UI improvements to the ehader, account bar, content posting process, iconogrpahy, out of the box colors, etc.
• Improved Message Posting: We streamlined the message posting process, taking 4 pages into one single page.

Performance

Optimized for scalability and high performance

• Built for the Enterprise: Features like server clustering and performance tuning make Jive Forums ideal for high traffic or mission-critical environments.
• Full Cache Control: Easily monitor and adjust cache settings, like cache size or expiration, to ensure maximum efficiency.
• Improved Clustering: Improvements in our clustering functionality allow greater control and flexibility to handle large-traffic sites. Overall performance and scalability has improved.

Security

Protect against viruses, hackers and spam

• Users can Keep their Existing Sign-On: Jive Forums integrates fully with your existing authentification mechanisms, which enhances the security of your site and improves the end-user experience.
• Control Attachments and Scan for Viruses: Administrators have comprehensive control over the kinds of files that can be attached to the forum. Attachments can also be scanned automatically for viruses.
• Protect Againts Hackers and Spam: New users are required to enter an automatically created image code to register, which prevents the automatic creation of user accounts by hackers. This enhances the security of your site and provides essential protection against unwanted spam.

Moderation

Prevent abuse with powerful moderation features

• Prevent Abuse with Powerful Moderation Features: The extensive and easy-to-use moderation features, such as message screening, batch processing, and fast keyboard navigation, ensure that any risk of abuse is minimal.
• Empower Your Community to Stop Abuse: Community members have the ability to report messages that don't meet the usage policies. Messages can be automatically hidden if a certain number of members report the post.

Reporting

Powerful, yet easy-to-use dashboards and statistics

• Easily Track and Monitor Activity: Get a summary of forum activity, including new messages, new topics, and forum popularity. The quick stats feature allows you to generate a valuable snapshot of activity for a preset or custom date range.
• Analyze Data and Produce Detailed Reports: Enable up to 20 different in-depth reports about forum usage, search usage, traffic, members, and open questions. Each report uses a date range and operates on a set of categories and forums.
• Receive Community Stats through RSS: Get the number of messages, threads, forums, and categories (for the community or specific forums) delivered through an RSS feed.

Internationalization

Set up your forums to work with multiple languages

• Get Forums in Multiple Languages: Localization lets you increase community participation and break through language barriers to reach more users in more countries. Jive Forums currently comes with English and Spanish translations, but can support many other languages.
• Associate the UI with a Locale (Gold Edition Only): Customize the look and feel of your community based on a specific locale.
• Users Determine their own Language Settings: This optional feature allows users to select their own language preference.

Integration

Integrate with email, knowledge base, or NTTP to extend your community

• Community Everywhere (Gold Edition Only): Allows website editors the option to include community/forums content directly into their own webpage. Useful for pulling users into the forums to discuss a product, solution, etc.
• Web Services: Provides collaborative services that can be used in your applications.
• Participate via Email: Jive Forums can import email (for example, a mailing list) into a forum using the gateway feature, and allow for seamless participation in discussions via email or the forum. All email becomes searchable, including attachments.
• View Forums Content with Your Newsreader: Jive Forums can act as an newsgroup (NNTP) server so that users can access forums content using their newsreaders, such as Outlook Express. It's a great way to transition legacy newsgroups into a more sophisticated environment.
• Email Reply to Watches: Enables the ability to allow users to reply to watch notification emails.
• Plug-in Framework: Developers are now able to transform any part of Jive Forums user interface programmatically and add new functionality within the application without having to touch the developer source.

Administration

Manage your system with integrated, web-based administration

• Easily Manage Content and Permissions: Controlling your content and user permissions is easy -- you can create new categories and forums on the fly, modify permissions for users and groups, define content interceptors and perform many other functions within the rich admin interface.
• Access Content via XML: The ability to import and export forums content via XML means you can reuse content easily.
• Extensive Settings: Build a unique community with full control over features like supported attachments, search engine optimization and avatars.
• Upgrade Framework: Instead of following a Read Me with multiple steps to upgrade a forums instance, administrators are able to launch the latest build, and the upgrade process takes over, updating any version from Forums 4.1 on up. One click upgrades take the pain out of upgrading.

Customization

Make it yours with easy customization options

• Make the Look and Feel Match your Brand: Jive Forums Silver Edition comes with one theme that you can customize to fit your community or completely replace to extend a unique look and feel of your own.
• Customize Your Interface and Content: Jive Forums is built for customization with features like filters, portlets, interceptors, SSO / auth integration, theme support, and more.
• Unlimited Themes with Forums Gold (Gold Edition Only): Jive Forums Gold Edition offers unlimited themes for rich customization.

Open Standards

As a pure J2EE application, Jive Forums is deployable on a wide variety of application servers, from Tomcat to WebLogic and WebSphere. The open database schema is available for many different databases, including MySQL and Oracle. Out of the box support for LDAP or Active Directory authentication and user data integration is included.

Easily Customizable

We've built Jive Forums to be easily customized for your own deployment. Plugin your own authentication system, modify the user interface, use RSS or XML to access the data, or add your own processing logic using the full API. For more extensive customizations, the full source code is provided.

Scalable and Fault-Tolerant

The server-side Java environment and extensive caching make Jive Forums extremely fast. Support for clustering based on the market-leading Coherence technology means the application can be deployed on multiple servers for scalability and fault-tolerance.

Secure

Jive Software's applications have been proven secure by thousands of customer installations. The administration console includes role-based access rights, and permission checking is done at the Java method level to guarantee that users only have access to the content they should.