Social Glass

Last week I had the opportunity to speak to Sam Lawrence about Clearspace 2.0, Jive Software’s next incarnation of Clearspace. A lot has been written about this new release today, and it’s generating a lot of buzz in the blogosphere (Jive’s annoucement appeared in Techmeme for a while yesterday, which is mostly unheard of for Enterprise 2.0 applications). Sam gave me an overview of the major new features:

• Project home pages can be “iGoogle-ized“. Users can personalize their home pages with drag and drop widgets.
• Cloud Participation: businesses can open up content to be shared with external business partners. Jive hosts the “cloud” where this content is uploaded and shared. The business can then draw its content back in once it’s done collaborating. In 2.0 only individual content items (documents) can be shared in this way. In future releases, entire workspaces can be shared in the cloud.
• Enhanced Reporting: Business departments can get metrics on who’s participating and who’s connecting. Good way to measure ROI, and this is key for management adoption of Enterprise 2.0.
• Social Graphs: The informal and formal networks are modeled in the Clearspace application. Clearspace 2.0 automatically derives formal networks through integration to directory services (i.e. Active Directory), and models informal networks by monitoring how users interact with each other.
• Jotlet Acquisition: Jotlet will enhance the project management features in Clearspace in upcoming releases.

Most importantly, Jive continues its focus on people, something that is lost with other “competitors” like Sharepoint. People are by far an organization’s greatest asset, and Jive’s recognition of this fact will see it emerge as the leader in the social productivity space (if it isn’t already).