Jive Software Releases Clearspace 2.0, Acquires Jotlet
Mark Hendrickson
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Jive Software has released version 2.0 of Clearspace, its collaboration suite for businesses. The company is also announcing that it has acquired Jotlet, makers of online calendar software.
Jive provides two products with the Clearspace name, both of which run on the same platform. The one getting upgraded is simply known as “Clearspace” and is used by businesses for internal collaboration purposes. This means holding discussions, sharing and working on documents, blogging, running polls, organizing projects, handling group tasks, and more. The other product is called “Clearspace Community” and consists of software that businesses can use to communicate with customers and the broader community.
Clearspace 2.0 has been upgraded in 5 primary ways. There are more social networking features that employees can use to learn about each others’ professional activities. The experience is more iGoogle-y, with lots of drag-n-drop modules that can be added and removed for customization purposes.
Jive has also built out what it’s calling an XMPP cloud that essentially gives outsiders access to particular sections of a Clearspace community. For example, if you are organizing a project using Clearspace (another new capability), you can invite partners from other companies to join you for just those projects. This feature exposes Clearspace to those who haven’t seen it before and gives it a viral edge.
Over the coming year, Jive will incorporate Jotlet’s technology into Clearspace to beef up its calendaring functionality. The company says it acquired Jotlet because it had a good API and integrated well with Outlook.
Jive claims that it now has over 2,000 customers, which includes 15% of the Fortune 500. It likes to explicitly pit Clearspace up against Microsoft SharePoint, which it says focuses more on file sharing than true collaboration. Clearspace, which is based on Java, comes as both a hosted and an on-premise solution, and is free for 5 people to try out. Additional seats are $59/year up to a certain size before enterprise pricing kicks in.
Jive is nice goods
Is it similar to Ning, but mainly used by businesses?
Ah. More upgrades. Have anyone here actually used it?
What about a review?
I have a few projects running around with different groups. If it’s plausible, this looks like a good start for integrated collaboration. Clearspace certainly looks professional enough.
Fara - http://www.pickmeuptoday.com
@2 although Jive has various tools, I would say that most vendors in this space are still flushing out what exactly “ning for businesses” is defined as. It’s still very much up for grabs, and you could bet that the 15% of the F500 is across all Jive products, such as their breadwinning forum, not just Clearspace!
I’m not surprised that Jive is not going to take MOSS head on with a contest over document management, that would be suicidal. However, I still think that Jive’s product management see social networking as a avenue or subset of classical enterprise “collaboration,” in the form of extending their existing resources. Although a sensible direction from a management perspective, I think the opposite is true, in that collaboration tools, forums, and the like are primitive incarnations of attempting to unlock the social networking problem.
@Faramir - I haven’t had a chance to compare it thoroughly to other offerings like SharePoint, but considered alone, it does indeed look professional and fully functional.
Hey Mark,
Minor correction. The project feature is just part of Clearspace not called “Clearspring.” Cheers.
@Sam - thanks, too many web 2.0 companies on the mind =)
who gives a flying $$$$
Congrats to Adam and Matt of Jotlet for being acquired. In an industry full of planet-sized egos, they are genuinely two of the nicest guys you could hope to meet.
I’ve never used Jive…but so far the only two things I’ve ever heard about it are this post and Arrington’s tweet last night about it being the worst business decision ever made for TechCrunch.
http://twitter.com/TechCrunch/statuses/784184958
Would have been great to have TechCrunch’s review of its own experiences with Jive included here.
Would like to hear from some of the people who have used it. Any +/- experiences? It seems like a very good tool.
Jive Software’s are expensive pieces of crap. Period.