In its most significant update to date, Jive Software is following the evolution of the social web in the enterprise with features that allow users the flexibility to use the tools in multiple ways.
Social Business 4.0 (SBS), is Jive’s latest version of its enterprise collaboration technology. In this new release, Jive includes deep integration with Microsoft Office, a mobile application for the iPhone and Blackberry plus the ability to bridge from internal to external communities.
Companies in the Enterprise 2.0 space are quickly finding that the era of isolation is pretty much over. Social technologies are not space age concepts anymore. It no longer feels like you are speaking a different language when talking about the social web. The users are there. And they want more than single-use applications.They want flexibility and convenience.
In this regard, Jive is offering the ability to create or save documents in Microsoft Office with automatic upload to the Jive platform. Documents are rendered for the browser for users to view and make comments. Users may also collaborate on documents such as Power Point presentations. This co-authoring feature is similar to what you can do in Google Docs. We expect to see more companies offering this type of co-authoring capability. Socialtext, for instance, came out of beta with SocialCalc, its distributed spreadsheet application.
Mobile applications are starting to make headway into the enterprise. SocialCast unveiled its iPhone application earlier this month. We expect that enterprise applications will proliferate over the next year.
Jive took this into consideration when deciding to go with an iPhine application. Analysts they spoke with said that enterprises are accepting the influx of iPhones, mostly due to huge demand for the device.
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The Jive application for the iPhone includes:
- Collaboration features for users to engage with others through discussion threads, blogs, documents, comments and replies
- Ability to follow people based on their activity stream
- A rich profile environment, providing the ability to quickly find people
For the Blackberry:
- Users may receive content they follow via email and reply as well to the content they follow. This includes content from blogs, discussions, documents and status updates.
- The application leverages vCard technology that users may download and apply to a particular space or group.
SBS 4.0 is a comprehensive update. It has a number of additional features including the ability to bridge communities outside the firewall. Other new features include tools for community managers to quantify the activity of their communities.
Jive SBS 4.0 is available now.
