Jive Social Business Software 5.0

Jive is very strong in Corporate Conversation because community and discussion is where they are coming from. Extensive forum functionality is available in all workspaces (spaces, groups, projects), threads are easily manageable and posts can be explicitly marked as questions. It is possible to publish posts in a personal or a workspace blog and publishing workflows help to release them at the right time. Commenting and rating is easy and well integrated throughout the whole platform. In addition, it is easy to set up polls and users can communicate via an internal messaging system.

Besides corporate conversation, the real strength of Jive is Networking and Expert Search. The profiles are well structured and contain a great deal of information including biographical background, expertise, groups and a reference to the personal blog. A tag cloud with the user’s most frequently used tags provides a quick overview about work focus and interests. Unlike competing products, Jive allows for a convenient one-way following mechanism, which is known from twitter. Each employee can be displayed in an organizational chart and suggests similar people when visiting a profile. Any keyword search will suggest matching experts and the advanced people search enables users to search people by tags, titles, department and more. Nevertheless we see potential in a more intelligent expert search.

Project management on a basic level is well supported in Jives Social Business Software. It is possible to set up a project workspace which includes a project blog, a project forum and a list of shared documents. Though it is possible to aggregate a bunch of widgets, including a project calendar, a progress bar and a summary of the project tasks on the customizable project dashboard, the functionality behind that cannot satisfy high demands. There is no time-tracking or requirements management. Tasks can be defined on different levels, but not with workflows.

Jive SBS is available either as an on-premise solution or an externally hosted SaaS. It is comparably easy to install and supports a wide range of operating systems and databases. Clustering is supported and scalability is reported to be unproblematic also in big company deployments with a couple of thousand users. Until now six languages are supported which include German, French and Spanish, besides English. With the 4.0 release Jive introduced dedicated support for mobile access. Besides enhanced content by e-mail functionality for all mobile phones and especially RIMs Blackberrys, a powerful native iPhone application was developed. Recently Jive has released a connector for SharePoint which integrates the products both ways and may solve Jives weakness in file management.

Jive supports various LDAP providers including Microsoft’s Active Directory for basic authentication. The access permissions are set on the workspace level and administrators can configure read-, write-and view-access on a very detailed level. Unlike SharePoint, documents are not on a separate permission layer. There is no life-cycle management but a decent repository service. Backups can be done automatically by a script.

In the US, Jive relies on a number of partners. For technical- and business consulting, they are working together with specialized partners. Support is guaranteed to respond within a business day; immediate 24/7 support is possible but causes additional costs. Since version 2.5, they provide a good online documentation, which is publicly available, along with some whitepapers on best practices. A growing community of implementers and developers is active on the Jive homepage (http://www.jivesoftware.com/jivespace/community/developer). New high quality product releases appear on a regular basis every half a year.