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Jive Software has released Clearspace 2.0, a major update of the industry leading collaboration suite. New features include:

• Personalized homepage - The widgetized home page is geared to drive faster adoption and improve employee focus and attention

• Expanded profile and org charts - Rich user profiles and organizational relationships increase context about people and make it easier to develop connections and find expertise. It provides a Facebook-like user browsing experience, but presented in a business-oriented org chart.

• Project spaces - Projects are designed to drive cross-functional productivity and manage towards an outcome, with tasks, checkpoints, and calendar views.

• Sharepoint integration - Integration helps bring unity across a common corporate intranet and leverages existing systems rather than creating yet another siloed system.

• External document sharing - Secure document sharing outside the firewall enables productivity tools to be extended to external partners and vendors when needed.

• Audit tools - The admin console's audit view provides visibility and control to IT administrators regarding any changes in the admin console.

• Backend upgrades - Upgrades to the core Clearspace underpinnings make it faster and more reliable.

For more details, please visit www.jivesoftware.com

Posted in Friends of Jivespace by Ryan Rutan

A scenario for a "Clearspace X" implimentation:

Proposed Case

Company ABC has an interactive user application XYZ. Non-company users use the ABC daily, posting information that has grown to be critical for company ABC efficiencies. However, the company is evaluating a need to update the interface/functionality for XYZ. In a meeting where solutions are pitched, a suggestion is made that will make XYZ more robust in the long-haul; however, as a trade-off, some of XYZ's existing functionality will need to be accessed differently, behaviorally changed, and/or lost all together. After the dust settles, the aforementioned suggestion holds the best long-term strategies at heart; however, it is constrained by the above tactical constraints. How do we proceed?

(assumption, statistically relevent sample of the user's of XYZ are reachable via an Online Community. Kind of a Catch-22, but provides reasoning on why a community platform investment is valueable)

Step #1 - Polling

In the community, we would post some high-level Polls to gauge initial feedback. Variations of the question could resemble something of this nature:

Which of the following features listed , do you feel is the most important?The answer set should include all features impacted by the recommended change, unless the list is long, in which case I would break the Poll into multiple Polls spanned over an appropriate time range. In each of these Polls, it is important to provide an option similar to, "None of the Features are important to me". Assuming we receive a large enough sample, we can immediately add some credence to the argument that the highly nominated features are in-fact relevant to a certain degree. An optional last poll could be taken to run the top most selected features from each poll together, to see their rank against each other.

At this point, we may or may not have additional steps. Assuming that a large percentage of people did not select the "None of the Features are important to me"...we can now go to the next step.

Step #2 - Targetted Forums

Now that you have some direction where there MAY be some friction, using the Forums element, post some questions to the community, suggesting the necessary changes to the features. Be up front about the impact, this is important. If the feature will not be there, dont sugar coat. A simple table presentation or easily digestable format is recommended. You can choose to possibly only include your top-ranked poll selections if desired. It will reduce the noise of the discussion thread most certainly; however, you risk losing an opportunity to get candid viral feedback about these features. If any doubt, error on the side of inclusion!

Assuming we get a similar turnout for feedback, we can evaluate specific elements of a feature that are desired and focus on possibly achieving that vs. the entire feature altogether. At this point, we should feel fairly confident in our understanding of these features, and their impact on application XYZ!

Note: In most communities you have "star performers" that represent above-average participation in the community. Be sure to take their feedback into consideration as a tie-breaker when in doubt.

Step #3 - Real-Time Interaction

If further clarity is stil needed, you can advertise an online chat, using the chat Integration in Clearspace X. Invite the target audience of participatns from the polls and forums, along with the rest of the community. In this chat, I would be even more candid about why you are on the fence. Ask direct questions to community, and open the floor for discussion. Discussions in real-time tend to draw out more debate as they tend to favor hot instinctive discussion, as opposed to cold predicated thought.

Each one of these steps can be repeated in any order at this point to achieve the desired level of comfort, but at the end of the day. You have tangible/quantifiable facts that represent the user-base, and can depend less on abstractions / interpretations of off-topic indirect feedback possibly related to the feature(s).

Summation

For companies that are highly dependent on satisfying a large distributed set of end-users, a community presence makes perfect business sense. Not only can you argue the traditional "self-service" argument as users help each other, but an established community platform provides a sounding board for the business to create quick and statistically relevant analysis for litmus testing ideas in the incubation stage. This will help to insure that ideas with solid business models with complementing solid understandings of the user receptiveness to said ideas are put at the forefront of development. In the new era of Web 2.0, where agility is king, the concept of a community presence is an invaluable ally in building brand loyality with an ever-growing and demanding marketplace.

My recent post that discussed Proof that departments & groups can become porous went into some detail and I have been asked to provide a simplified overview on how clients appreciate the benefits of using Clearspace.

People have told us that moving to Clearspace -- a single collaboration platform -- has vastly amplified the importance of who is participating and what value they add. This has been very different for them than their previous point solutions like wikis and/or really hard-to-use platforms like Microsoft Sharepoint. The analogy we've heard is that people's identity is in a way, a bit like the notion of identity on Ebay. Since Ebay is a single, open marketplace, the glue that holds it all together are the reputations and integrity of the sellers and buyers. If areas of Ebay were walled off, people could be a jerk in one area and the people in the other areas wouldn't know it. That anonymity is a problem that Clearspace solves. When previously siloed content from wikis, forums, email, or instant messaging is unlocked and opened, suddenly what people say and do matters a whole lot more because their contributions are attached to a single identity.

2. Silence is broken and new "go to" talent discovered

When everyone is working on the same platform, people feel compelled to participate because it's easy and because they fear they will "miss out." This allows you to know where everyone's attention is. Unlike in meetings, where a few people dominate the discussion, in Clearspace people can thoughtfully participate without fear of being put on the spot, or needing to have an immediate answer. Think about how much untapped, immeasurable value is lost because people don't feel like they have the time, permission or confidence to speak up. Customers have been amazed at how many talented people they've discovered reading the internal blogs in Clearspace.

3. People in different departments (and even different organisations) make good ideas better

As simple as this sounds, opening up dialog between people in different teams makes a huge impact. Ideas are shaped and refined by an expanded group of people with different skill sets and backgrounds. For example, one customer told us a story about how the Marketing team was thinking about doing a certain promotion and people in Sales chimed in and shared war stories that helped the Marketing team re-direct what they were going to do. Then one of the partners who had been given access to that collaboration area chimed in with even more specific ideas for what they had seen be successful. And so on. \"Extending the Enterprise\" beyond departments and even organizations can improve ideas tenfold. Of course, the fact that you can wall off areas of Clearspace if you need to, is a big plus, too.

4. Answers found in fast and unexpected ways

A unified tagging system, topic organization, and search system makes it easy to find content. But, it's really how fast you can build assets that's shocking. Here's an example that happened at Jive -- a prospect called the Sales team and had a very specific list for how we'd measure up against Microsoft Sharepoint 2003. The salesperson posted the list in the internal instance of Clearspace and immediately one of their engineers saw it and filled in most of the blanks. Then someone from Professional Services chimed in with some added content. Same thing with Marketing and Support. In 30 minutes the salesperson had a ton of answers to the original post and all she had to do was click "convert to document," which pulled the individual comments into a wiki-document. Then she stripped everything out except the valuable answers. Immediately, she had something to send back to the prospect and everyone had a reusable document to call upon later. Typically, a question like this would be emailed to many people and it would take days to get a one-dimensional answer, if an answer was found at all. For some reason, people see a lot of people CC'd and everyone thinks someone else is responsible. But when everyone can see no one has yet answered, people take action.

We often hear how much people like the fact that Clearspace is built for everyone to use, not just the techies. A lot of people have trouble with application wikis because you have to be very technical (or an information designer) to use them--that is, if they even know what a wiki is. Wikimarkup is great for people who love code -- but not meant for everyone else. Palm's proprietary handwriting language should have taught us no one wants to learn a new language just to participate. That said, most newer wiki products are switching to allow both wiki syntax and gui editors for this very reason. Many of our customers have tried wikis only to find all their wiki pages grew out of control, since everyone had a different idea on how to "self organize" all that content. Not everything has a simple way to organize information like Wikipedia. In fact, we've gotten several emails from potential customers looking to convert thousands of pages into something they can digest and use. Wikis are definitely an important part of the overall tapestry of collaboration, but so far, our customers love that Clearspace provides an easy structure so the content doesn't turn into a confusing rat's nest of pages and people can still create content the way they like (not to mention find it again).

6. Unifying by topic keeps focus

A main feature of Clearspace is that it unifies all types of content by subject vs content type. So, if a company decides to start a subject called "Gizmo Pro," all the content that's appropriate for the Gizmo Pro can be created and revealed in that area. Too often the same issues, questions, and ideas occur in walled-off channels. Companies set up a wiki, a forum, a blog and their own sites and "Gizmo Pro" content lives in all those areas with no unification. So questions are asked over and over. Ideas are only exposed to a few or they wither away, masked off from the people who could really help. Being able to focus any type of content (like binary files, pictures, videos) on things like "Gizmo Pro" is a massive benefit that our Clearspace customers always find immediately valuable.

7. How you use email will change

People love to proclaim the death of other things. Radio was supposed to kill books. TV was supposed to kill radio. The Internet was supposed to kill TV. The truth is, new mediums just help evolve old mediums. Email isn't going away any time soon. That said, early Clearspace customers have felt like their email volume has dropped as much as 75% (though that was a feeling vs. a statistic) and the emails they do receive, or send to others, are much more purposeful. Interestingly, most of those have to do with "the outside world" that aren't in their Clearspace environment. More to come on this one.

8. Easier to stay on top of what's happening

When discussions occur only in email or in the hall, only those invited get to know about it. Many companies have told us that the more they saw the value in opening up discussions and content in Clearspace, the more everyone did it and the more everyone could then tell what was happening across the company. Many have even told us that they're becoming annoyed when people send them emails that should really just be discussions inside Clearspace.

9. Microsoft Office gets used less

Once people get used to creating content in an open system, going back to launching different applications for different content types quickly becomes annoying. Not to mention being on the receiving side of someone who points you to a Microsoft Word document. Ultimately, you just want to see the content in with everything else rather than that content living in sealed container.

10. Clearspace removes tons of cost and management

As salesy as it sounds, the practical reality is that with a company standardizing on Clearspace, there's no need for all those separate collaborative applications. Available at an amazing low cost it has been a massive benefit to our customers. Not to mention that IT absolutely loves that it's truly an enterprise-class J2EE application with permissions, moderation, clustering, version management, and security. Engineering just wants a wiki? No problem, they just enable that content for that department from a single, web-based console. Sales just wants discussions and blogging -- IT can just check some boxes. Same thing with the look of the application. With easy CSS changes, the entire application can have a drastically different look and feel so that it melds seamlessly with the style that everyone is already used to. This means departments don't go running off to purchase a one-off hosted application that has no integration with everything else -- the IT department can make them just as happy.

Having been involved in the document and record management software market for the past few years has helped me understand the value of managing documentation in effective and appropriate ways. One of the more interesting insights was the feedback that people only liked a product when they did not know it was there - "it was transparent and/or required little or no effort to use".

I have always been more curious about the information that was being stored and how accessible it would be long term. Early in 2007 there was a more public awareness of social networking products under the now more familiar banner of Web 2.0. Common examples of products in this sector included MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook which continue to have a huge impact with internet users.

What was coming on the back of this development were applications that were being specifically built for business. These applications have been grouped into a category known as Enterprise 2.0.

We could see that a lot more information was going to be produced and a lot more information would need managing. Some of this information was expected to be structured but a lot was going to be unstructured. Could we again see a new platform arriving that would make spare of all the previous work?.

By mid 2007 it was very clear that these new applications were not going to go away and in fact the growth numbers were huge and expected to have a large impact on the ECM market. Organisations, certainly outside of Australia, could see that these new applications could provide them with an ability to provide knowledge management, team collaboration and a means to manage and share information with co-workers, partners and clients. In Australia we have a slightly better understanding of document and record management systems which are prevalent in government, education and large corporations.

The best of both applications would see the "rules" layer and the "database" from an ECM used to provide a regulated central repository for both structured and unstructured information with the flexibility to deliver this information back on demand to the collaboration layer seamlessly - the end user being totally unaware of this function.

The major issue we see is not the technology integration but rather the licensing required from your ECM vendor! We hope sense prevails and "gateway" licenses are used which at the end of the day will but only promote both applications.

We welcome your comments.