GigaOM » Collaboration

Machines will help humans harness the power of social

Stacey Higginbotham — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 20:41:29 +0000

Social is no guarantee of effectiveness in an organization because it creates unnecessary friction as people try to figure out how to work in new ways, according to David Gutelius, the Chief Social Scientist at Jive Software speaking at the GigaOM Net:Work event Thursday. Gutelius said that while such software might be intuitive, fast and beautiful to look at, it’s also just another way to push work forward, which essentially boils down to finding the right resource for whatever the employee is trying to do.

That resource might be a person or a document, but the employee still has to find it. That’s where the machines come in. Software that learns about employees, their relationships in the company and outside the company can help humans navigate social environments more quickly, and even pull in resources that may not even be on the network. For example, Gutelius used the example of the Army realizing that one of its soldiers had figured out a new way to help deal with IEDs in Iraq. This soldier wasn’t even online, but by tracking the improvement in certain squads and soldiers the Army was able to identify this individual and promote him. He was also given a forum to teach soldiers more widely.

This example shows not only how creepy this type of software could be, but also how close it is to reality. Some people might resent having their relationships mapped at such a level. Imagine if you are in a department with a horrid boss and trying to switch roles within the company. Such software might draw unwanted attention to your wooing of the marketing department as you tried to escape product management.

Anyhow, creepy or not, Gutelius’ adaptive social computing is a few years away from widescale adoption, and no longer the stuff of science-fiction fantasies.

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Photo by Pinar Ozger.

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Jive’s Proximal Labs Buy Signals Enterprise Big Data Push

Simon Mackie — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 15:35:53 +0000

Jive Software, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based vendor of enterprise social business tools, said it has acquired Proximal Labs, a supplier of machine-learning and data-mining software. The move signals Jive’s intent to expand on it efforts to mine the enterprise social graph: analyzing user behavior and relationships in order to assist companies in becoming more productive. It also shows how deeper analytics is a must-have feature in enterprise social tools.

Proximal’s team will join Jive’s engineering group. Jive says Proximal’s technology should bolster its current analytics capabilities, making its software more intelligent and enabling it to offer the following features:

Provide insight into relationships between employees, customers and partners
Bolster the existing intelligence engine, which delivers content and expertise recommendations
Enhance its search capabilities to cover large-scale external and internal data to deliver personalized results
Provide data on the expertise and work of individuals and teams, as well as customers and partners
Improve Jive’s current social media monitoring features

Financial details of the acquisition have not been disclosed.

With so much potentially valuable insight to gather from the vast amounts of data generated by the users of enterprise social networking tools, Jive isn’t the only social business vendor looking to further its big data efforts, of course. IBM also been making strides in this arena with the Social Analytics features in its Lotus Connections product, while other vendors, such as Yammer and Salesforce Chatter, also now offer analytics features. As the various enterprise social networking apps have matured, their feature sets have converged; the ability to offer companies intelligent tools to mine the data generated by their employees could prove to be a key differentiator in this highly competitive market. With this deal, Jive is keeping up with the Joneses.

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The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

Jive's Clearspace Brings Collaboration and Social Tools To Enterprises

Jason Harris — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 19:00:37 +0000

Companies big and small are constantly seeking tools to bring their workers closer together. We are a workforce who is spread out geographically. Even if workers are located in the same locale, with today’s matrix organizations, an individual is a part of multiple projects that creates a tug of war for attention and focus. This is where the promise of web-based collaboration becomes apparent.

37Signals’ BaseCamp, covered before, provides a popular web-based product tool, but what if you’re a team or workgroup who is looking for something a little more robust?

Jive Software has released version 2.0 of their Clearspace product. Clearspace differs from other product offerings by focusing their product on the people who will be utilizing the collaboration tool. Unlike Microsoft SharePoint, which focuses on documents, ClearSpace wants to ensure user adoption by adapting many of the Web 2.0 strategies used by FaceBook, MySpace, and other social networking sites into the enterprise environment.

Bring Social into Work Collaboration

Users who log in to Clearspace will first see their personalized home page. Dubbed “iGoogle for your work life,” this web page is a widgetized window into your working world. You can customize your activity streams and you can see recent activity on users by hovering over their name. Presence indicators allow you to see the person’s availability for an IM conversation.

The startpage shows you status of all your projects, to-do lists, and related information. You can update your status, similar to Facebook. For example, you could state, “Jason is unit testing his code for the calendar widget”. You can also set announcements, use polls, and see tag clouds for Clearspace content. Check out the video below, courtesy of Dennis Howlett’s review of Clearspace 2.0.

Getting Work Done

Clearspace wants to be the hub of your project management. With their management utilities, you can create project calendars, milestones, assign tasks, discuss project status, and upload documents. Using their customizable interface, you can drag projects you want to keep an eye onto your homepage and keep tabs on the project via RSS feeds.

As a unique feature, Clearspace allows you to collaborate on documents with people outside your corporate firewall, similar to the functionality in Google Docs. Clearspace can also search and interact with data within Microsoft SharePoint.

The Competition is Stiff

Microsoft SharePoint is a leader in enterprise collaboration. As a SharePoint user and proponent in my day job, I’m familiar with its shortcomings. SharePoint has features such as shared calendars, task lists, document libraries and a few collaborative web tools such as blogs, wikis, and message boards. However each component is shut off from the others, making the creation of a cohesive project website tedious. SharePoint requires a high degree of trial and error and end-user training. With SharePoint, Microsoft has focused on function over user-friendliness.

Jive seems to have heard the battle cries of disgruntled employees who want to effectively collaborate with their teammates and co-workers. Clearspace, with its streamlined UI and usability, helps individuals and teams create intranets that blend attractive aesthetics and functional project sites.

Conclusion

Clearspace’s focus on giving its users the ability to set up a workspace and presenting the information that is of interest to them is a strategic advantage. FaceBook calls itself a social utility to keep you in touch with the people around you. Clearspace has taken strides to be the work utility to keep you in touch with the projects and co-workers who you depend on day-to-day to help you get your work done.

There are two purchasing options for Clearspace, a hosted model and a licensed/self-hosted model. The Licensed model sits behind your company’s firewall and is priced at $5 per user per month. For more information on hosted model pricing, see Jive’s website.

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The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview