Social Glass

I wrote about Clearspace a few months ago and was recently given the chance to take a second look. Clearspace is made by Jive Software, a company that appeared on the horizon in 2001 and did a lot of work with Sun Microsystems at that time. They survived the economic downturn after 9/11 and have recently emerged as a leading contender in the Enterprise 2.0 arena. Enterprise Web 2 and Dion Hinchliffe have recently written positively about Jive’s offering.

Why is Jive worth a look? Clearspace is an application that provides a cohesive set of Enterprise 2.0 capabilities including blogs, wikis, tagging, social profiles and document management. By “cohesive” I mean to point out that it’s not a loosely coupled set of disparate applications. And I emphasize document management as many corporate citizens I’ve spoken to about Enterprise 2.0 note this to be a capability that is lacking in most solutions. Document management is crucial to maturing content and innovation.

Clearspace also has an impressive “reputation generation” system (which is very customizable) and I can see a lot of relevance here when trying to create incentives for contribution. Imagine attributing a dollar value to a user’s reputation when bonuses are allocated at year end.

But perhaps the greatest feature Clearspace brings to the market is its monolithic security model. Enterprises that have invested in Directory Services (such as Active Directory) can integrate these into Clearspace and properly secure content inside the application using pre-established roles and groups. From my experience security is the number one concern around Enterprise 2.0 so this is a big selling point.

Jive also realizes that Enterprise 2.0 extends beyond the firewall to external parties (i.e. business partners). They provide an intriguing mechanism for pushing content into a SaaS cloud for temporary external collaboration, then pulling the output of said activity back behind the firewall for protection.

One downside is the seat-based licensing model. Enterprise 2.0 prides itself on organic growth and adoption, and this is hindered if companies have to buy more licenses before knowledge workers can use the system.

Jive also takes a philosophical stance on social networking, saying networking for the sake of it doesn’t add much value (i.e. how much value do you get out of LinkedIn if you’re not a recruiter?) and that we should instead focus on social productivity - the collaborative benefits one gains by being connected to people (as I understand it). Personally I think social networking has benefits in its own right, especially when we think of creating networks based on groups of interest of subject matter expertise, and I think this is likely a key component to the discovery process.

Regardless, Jive is definitely worth a look!