Techpaulogy

Clearspace just took enterprise collaboration to a whole new level - hello 2.5

I am so excited. Hunkered down here at the Jive HQ (Club Fed), our whole team has been cranking like never before. Engineering, Marketing, Product, Sales, you name it -- everyone has been heads down building, testing, re-mixing, and giving feedback on our Clearspace platform. We've been sitting on the 2.5 beta here for a month or two, and it is hands-down our best release ever. You can tell by how pumped everyone is here internally. We are so excited we literally bumped launch from September into August, effectively taking our launch runway from 5+ weeks to 2 (kind of a masochistic move). We just want to get it out there for everyone to get their hands on. I honestly can't imagine ever working for a company that doesn't have some kind platform like this to add a "social productivity" layer to its business underpinnings.

Ok, so what is so cool? Here's some highlights:

• Brand new text editor that can handle images and streaming video like butter. Drag, drop, re-size, publish. Never been easier (and you know that's what it takes to drive user adoption).
• Dynamic search that guesses what you are after as you type (broken out by Content, People, and Spaces). I barely need to even go to a search results page anymore.
• Social networking all over the place, including status updates, friends, groups, people search, etc. I mean really, Facebook for the enterprise. But a lot less spammy.
• Theming console for dummies. Now you don't need to know java or struts or freemarker (or whatever you needed to know) -- there's just a UI in the admin console, like popular consumer CMS/blogging platforms. And if you want to get ninja, there's an example CSS kit that you download, modify, and re-upload. Smooooth.

Anyway, go and check it out for yourself:

• Clearspace - connect employees with a comprehensive social productivity collaboration solution
• Clearspace Community - build customer communities and integrate your other online marketing channels (like SEO).

P.S. Props to the SWEET videos by Kalani (and edited in part by Sigler). And Sam is shaking things up at Go Big Always...

Jive Won "Technology of the Year" Award from Infoworld

Jive just won Infoworld's annual Technology of the Year award, for its Clearspace X online community software. Specifically, Clearspace X was recognized as the  "Best Community Platform" in the Applications and Middleware category, alongside other winners like Oracle SOA Suite ("Best Enterprise Service Bus"). Winners were chosen by InfoWorld Test Center editors and reviewers:

"these Technology of the Year award winners represent the best business process management system, best enterprise service bus, best database middleware, and the best SaaS collaboration and community platforms we tested in 2007."

The award is based on a review of version 1.1.1 earlier in the year, and since then there have been a number of great additions, including:

• Customizable dashboard (users can filter updates & new content they're interested in)
• Customizable interface (admins can drag-and-drop rearrange and add content modules)
• Popular and related content widgets connect blog posts, wiki documents, and discussion threads
• 1-Click sending discussion/forum/blog/wiki content via email

More commentary on the award can be found at:

• Silicon Florist
• Fast Wonder
• Jive Talks

All Your (data)Base Are Belong To Us

Online databases, be warned: you are mine. I just ran across a web broswer from Kirix, called Strata, that's really a "data browser". From their site:

Kirix Strata is a new specialty browser for accessing and manipulating data from the web. View and work with data from web tables, CSV files, and RSS feeds, integrate information from web services to create personal "desktop mashups," browse and work with MySQL, Oracle and other databases.

It's a pretty slick, based on Mozilla's Gecko engine, that's well integrated into the other tools I use (e.g. Office). Beyond being able to automate report creation out of web-based tools, it lets you mashup data from different sources. I am just beginning to test what I can do to (and stats I can generate). Get excited. Does anyone else use other data extraction tools for web-apps? (For example, Selenium IDE).

And, for old times sake, All Your Base... the original video, on YouTube.

Taking RSS to the Next Level - Unleashing Your Business Data

I've been a huge fan of RSS technology since its inception -- having been a rabid Bloglines user, and more recently Google Reader (I prefer its mobile interface, which I use about an hour a day on my Treo to pull down the latest news on the way to work).

But, these consumer applications are only the tip of the iceberg for the true power of RSS. It offers a much more robust platform for information distribution, where applications like e-mail fall short. It makes content ultra-portable and functional, where before it was locked in databases behind clunky websites or software UIs. It separates content from structure -- and businesses are rapidly realizing the upside to this.

How so? Well, if my personal RSS stream's goal is to get the right information to me in an organized fashion, scale that up to a business level where a corporation can "get the right information to the right people at the right time" -- that punchline came to me via Attensa, a client that is charging forward in the Enterprise RSS space. There are so many applications for RSS in a business, just to name a few:

• Team collaboration and project management feeds (bye-bye distribution lists)
• Delivering sales data and marketing collateral to empower a distributed sales team (no more digging for email attachments)
• Persistent search and timely delivery of relevant information (stop skimming that inbox full of newsletters and Google Alerts)
• And hey, let's not forget the guys over in IT -- security features to block malicious code and provide a controlled environment for information flowing through (and behind) the firewall

The team at Attensa is hard at work on two products to enable all this. First, the RSS reader for Outlook, which is really slick. It's not your average reader. To start with, a ETech they just rolled out a new version that ranks articles based on user interest and attention (dubbed "AttentionStream") by tracking reading behavior -- on an individual and aggregate level across an organization. On top of that it's integrated and optimized for Outlook, where most of us live 9-5 M-F.  It also has a toolbar for IE/Firefox to handle RSS feeds in the wild, and syncs with your del.icio.us tags. To explore it further, you can download the software for free and give it a try.

Second, on the other side of the information distribution pipeline (well, smack in the middle, actually) sits Attensa's RSS feed server. This is where businesses can truly capture the essence of Enterprise 2.0. Through a relatively easy-to-deploy appliance (on a LAMP stack -- the most recent server release also can be implemented via software appliance or hosted solution), administrators can securely distribute, manage, and track RSS/ATOM/XML feeds from internal and external blogs, wikis, and websites. Employees can then subscribe to these feeds on a selective/filtered basis and receive the information in Microsoft Outlook, in their browser, in their instant messenger, or on a mobile device. Where ever and however the information is in the most useful context.

By combining these tools (or even just the Outlook reader) you can really take RSS applications to the next level.