Jive Ventures Out of the Box with Clearspace X

Published: May 23, 2007

by Alex Woodie

In today's Web-connected world, people have a multitude of ways to communicate. Depending on the participants or even the time of day, users might reach out via e-mail, telephone, or IM, or they might seek a wider audience by using RSS, Wikis, blogs, or Web forums. Instead of using a separate application for each communication type, companies like Jive Software are providing a single integrated collaborative stack. Now, Jive is enabling organizations to discriminate between internal and external communication with the delivery of Clearspace X.

In February, Jive Software launched Clearspace 1.0, a new server-based product designed to help groups of workers in an organization share ideas and documents in a collaborative environment. The initial release of Clearspace lets users create wiki-style documents on the Web that can be edited by other members of the group and also share binary documents, like Word, Excel, and PDFs. In each case, the software provides versioning and workflow tracking. Real-time notification capabilities (via e-mail, IM, or RSS) tell users who is editing a document, and when they've finished and released it. The software also allows users to create threaded discussions (good for question and answer sessions), and tagging. Content rating systems provide a feedback loop and a way for ideas to grow organically.

Last week, the Portland, Oregon, the company launched Clearspace X, a version of Clearspace that allows organizations to offer external users the same type of multi-faceted collaboration that their internal users have benefited from with Clearspace 1.0. The two products are basically the same, with the exception of the addition of "walls" into Clearspace X to separate public from private content, and a more robust permissioning and security system.

Jive's chief marketing officer, Sam Lawrence, says Clearspace X will provide much more freedom than competing collaboration solutions, notably Microsoft's Sharepoint Server software. "Instead of being a room full of books and a strict library check-in and check-out process, Clearspace X is based on teamwork and sharing of ideas," Lawrence says. "The real gold mine is, you write a blog, show it to some people, we all contribute to it, and then we publish externally. People make some comments, they're brought inside, now you're closing the collaboration loop. We're doing things you can't do right now with software in a place to expose ideas and assets."

Jive also expects Clearspace to bring benefits to organizations that have no structured collaboration systems in place, except for e-mail. Clearspace addresses "the pain point of having to e-mail files all over the place," Lawrence says. "We are trying to change how people work. There's not a place to go. Right now, there's e-mail, which is a place, but it's not a team place."

The fact that Clearspace can track and search across so many forms of communication provides a powerful argument for organizations struggling with integration issues, Lawrence says. "It's not more content. It's more that the content and the discussions and the assets you already have are organized by topic, by team, and they're pulled together in a collaborative environment that helps you find the content again," he says.

"Tons of companies are invested in wikis, blogs, and forums, but they don't know where to go to find the information. The content is all over the place, and it's not open for everybody," Lawrence adds. "The reason they like this product is they don't have to buy all those products. And they don't have to go to [a company's] support forums, looking for tons of conversation, only to find out none are relevant to me, then go to a third-party site to see if somebody has blogged about it."

Clearspace X will be a success because organizations have just started to realize the untapped possibilities of advanced forms of collaboration and the business benefits they can bring. "It's socially opening things up that have been locked away," he says. "It's hot right now because people can see the results of collaboration is better than if it's kept behind closed doors. The ideas are better the answers come more quickly."

Like Clearspace 1.0, Clearspace X is based on an open-source framework that makes it very easy for users to plug into the tools they already use. For example, both Clearspace products support Openfire, Jive's instant messaging and voice over IP (VoIP) software. Openfire (which was formerly called Wildfire) is a server-based product that supports Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). The voice and IM functionality is accessible through a client component called Spark Web.

Clearspace 1.0 and Clearspace X are written in Java and run on Windows Server 2003, Linux, Solaris, and Mac OS X operating systems. The software supports an array of Java Web application servers and database management systems--both commercial and open source.

Clearspace X version 1.11 is available now. The product is free for the first five users. An annual fee for 1,000 users costs $4,950, while a license for unlimited users costs $19,950. For more information, visit www.jivesoftware.com

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