Jive Tweaks Its Social PlatformJive Tweaks Its Social Platform

Wiki and social networking vendor Jive Software has decided it can kill two birds with one stone. It's combining its Clearspace wiki product and its Clearspace Community social networking product into a combined social platform it calls Social Business Software 3.0.

The new software looks a lot like Clearspace upon first blush because it has the same base, the same user interface, and a lot of the same features. However, it has a number of new features, and Jive has added a few new versions targeted at specific roles such as marketing, sales, innovation, support, and employee engagement.

Social Business Software (SBS) has a full array of features that might be expected to be found in a social platform, including search, document tagging, bookmarking, a homepage or dashboard, RSS feeds, discussion boards, blogs, workgroups, social profiles, friend connections, and status updates.

Now, however, it adds a number of new features such as the ability to export information to a business intelligence tool, a tool that does sentiment analysis of documents and pages on the wiki, a video portal, and the ability to bridge an internal instance of SBS with an external, public-facing instance of SBS.

Those features will likely put Jive up against established social and content management platforms such as Socialtext, SharePoint, Oracle Social CRM and some of IBM's new Lotus software.

SBS 3.0 will be available sometime before the end of March and is aimed most squarely at large enterprises. Jive has now been around for eight years, but it's continuing to experience significant growth, even in lean times. Last year, the Sequoia Capital-backed company grew 70%, added 200 new customers, and formed a new executive team.

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