Jive Software - Enterprise 2.0 Collaborative Platform

Here is another cross post with the FastForward blog in my series on enterprise 2.0 tools. I recently spoke with Dave Hersh, CEO at Jive Software. We both have a management consulting background and even addressed some common issues. Dave was involved in implementing collaboration and knowledge management solutions in the 90s. He is familiar with the problems encountered in the intranet era. Some of the same coordination issues have started to emerge in Enterprise 2.0. In the early days of intranets the implementation was relatively easy and many rouge sites emerged causing a bit of chaos. The potential now exists for similar chaos with multiple tools, channels, and overlapping content sites.

Jive started in the enterprise collaboration space in 2001 with Jive Forums for threaded discussions and added Open Fire for real time collaboration. They have built a customer base of over 1800 clients, many in the Fortune 500 space where they have a 12-15% market penetration. In February of this year they launched Clearspace to serve as an Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platform. There are 80 customers so far. The interface has the look of a portal but the substance within the portal comes through Enterprise 2.0 tools. The arrangement of the interface is flexible and you can group content by topic instead of by application which is a useful feature.

Clearspace offers a number of web 2.0 tools such as blogs and wikis but adds more connection points to enhance their use in the business environment. They have surrounded the tools with process-oriented workflows to better manage the collaboration around content creation. For example, with the wiki you can invite others to work on the content and add approvals. You can also proactively send out notices through email. Then their email responses are automatically integrated into the Clearspace wiki. This gives the aggregation and archiving feature of wikis but does not require all participants to go there if you think your audience will not take to new tools (a likely situation in many businesses).

You can also rate the contributions of others. This is a feature that should be used with care within the enterprise as different dynamics occur in the workplace that on web sites like digg or Newsvine. But it can be add value in the right situation.

To further help people who do not take as easily to new tools, you can work in a wiki style interface or a more conventional one and easily switch between them. These same features apply to their blog tool and many of the collaboration features can be used to enable group work on Word, Powerpoint, and other common desktop applications. All of the content from these tools can be aggregated and viewed through the Clearspace portal.

Clearpsace provides some control over the rules. You can make content public or private, and set permissions, You can output content as PDFs. It works in multiple formats so you can upload and manage files, images and video and keep track of different versions.

I think Clearspace addresses at a very real potential obstacle to successful Enterprise 2.0 collaboration. Many of the tools and features are now available elsewhere but Clearspace offers a common architecture to allow for more order and accessibility. They are currently planning to integrate with other tools to broaden their reach.

Here is an example that the Clearspace team shared with me. One Economy is a multinational nonprofit organization that brings broadband to the homes of low-income people and provides a multilingual Web portal called The Beehive. One Economy has 60 workers in 10 offices and was looking for an intranet-type of solution to connect everyone and foster company collaboration. Previously, they were using a shared filed server that was only available to certain offices.

One Economy adopted Clearspace about 6 months ago. They named their internal collaboration tool “The Buzz” to match up with their public site, The Beehive. This is an excellent first step. In past implementations, we always encouraged the knowledge management and collaboration system to take on a company specific name that captured its goal. The One Economy team has also used personal and humorous touches to encourage collaboration, another best practice. For example, the CIO has his own audio blog and the employees’ personalities are being expressed through the use of avatars.

Before adopting Clearspace, One Economy used a file sharing server that wasn’t available to its regional offices. Now Clearspace is available to all employees and offices, making it easier for everyone to receive input on their documents and share the knowledge contained within them. The team reports that because of the broader access, the Buzz has led to increased document sharing among offices. It has also provided more efficient internal communications and collaboration since everyone could now access the collaboration platform. It will be interesting to see where this goes and what type of innovation might result from the increased openness and connectivity. enterprise 2.0 web 2.0 enterprise social media

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