What a Contrast - Jive Software Connects with Sharepoint

Written by Alex Williams / October 6, 2009 9:23 PM / 8 Comments

When the dust settles after the Sharepoint 2010 launch, a number of questions will be answered. In particular, does Sharepoint match the best of breed social enterprise applications that keep entering the market?

Probably not. More so, the future more likely will be a mix of Sharepoint technology fitted with applications from companies like Jive Software, the social business software provider which today announced a social layer for Sharepoint.

Sharepoint is a beast to some and a darling to others. Like any entrenched technology you have to live with it, no matter how contrasting your technology may be.

Jive Software seems to be in that place, right in the middle. Their technology has received high acclaim. But they are a small company. At this point, their best option is to integrate with Sharepoint so users may get the benefits of its social capabilities.

Jive will offer companies a social layer that rides across Sharepoint's content silos. These include the Jive Sharepoint Connector, which allows users to connect between Jive Social Business Software and Microsoft Sharepoint. Users may connect content and activities that originate in either Jive or Sharepoint through a single stream.

Jive is banking on the power of the social graph. The premise being that people have become accustomed to using technologies that leverage a social graph, use multi-threaded discussions, blogging and user-defined tagging. These are applications that have a time dimension, a river of news, or what is now being called an activity stream.

What's in contrast are the architectural differences between Jive and Sharepoint, a document-based software where content is stored in data silos. In a not so subtle way, Jive's press release states that:

"CMS solutions were not architected for rich dialog around content....Conversations and activities often occur "off the grid" in email vacuums."

The press release goes on to say that most organizations have several generations of legacy documents with valuable content being lost or invisible.

Jive maintains that its software will serve as a unifier, allowing companies to "socialize," content and unlock what is trapped in these data silos. Search can only dive so deep into the silos. It is the relationships and interests that will foster the connections with content authors and their networks.

Those are pretty lofty goals. Activity streams, especially when aggregated, do illuminate conversations but what about the legacy documents? Will this unifying layer surface information, creating an ecosystem of experts and related information?

What we do like is the idealism and pragmatism baked into Jive's plan.

On the pragmatic side, there is the standard integration with unified searches reflecting both application environments. Jive's plan is designed to comply with corporate data and security policies. It includes "semantically rich" IT business rules to define how and when content is distributed.

On the idealist side, we can see the pure, unadulterated, passionate view about the effects that social technologies can have on the enterprise.

We will see how this mix works. There is no doubt that Sharepoint and Jive are in the same space. It's just their contrasts that are so striking:

"....administrators strictly define what, how and when content gets socialized out of Sharepoint hierarchies."

Socialaized out of Sharepoint hierarchies?

That sounds like what you get when you mix corporate IT and the social web.

Comments

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The UI looks great.

Posted by: 布里斯班 | October 6, 2009 9:32 PM

We are skipping the integration and are working on the import tool for Sharepoint content only at this point. Most of our customers don’t care and don’t want to deal with MOSS any more. We did do an integration with Documentum, but who cares about SharePoint any more, come on, move on people.

Posted by: jeux educatifs | October 7, 2009 4:10 AM

If you're looking to add further functionality to SharePoint by adding reporting, business intelligence and dashboards then check out Windward Arrow.

The product is made from a Microsoft Certified Partner and effectively transforms SharePoint into an enterprise level system for comprehensive document generation, reporting, business intelligence, mail merge, dashboards and so much more.
Windward Arrow Info, Webinars and Demo here

Posted by: GrahamS | October 8, 2009 11:10 AM

Sounds interesting, and im curious...
But hey! Curiosity killed the cat :(

Posted by: Free iPod | October 11, 2009 3:42 PM

l like this Sharepoint Ul

Posted by: bulag | October 11, 2009 5:55 PM

The differences between MOSS and Jive are stark - but SharePoint 2010 is a completely different animal. It has far better social capabilities, a better UI and user experience, and (crucially) integrates more seamlessly with Office than Jive ever can.

I think that Jive are running a little scared - MOSS was dreadful for social and everyone knew it. Jive got there first but now they might have a serious competitor. SharePoint is ubiquitous across the corporate environment eventhough it's rubbish. Whether people will want to pay for the social sexiness of Jive on top of all their bundled Microsoft lciences and acceptable socialness of 2010 is going to be the critical factor to which wins.

Posted by: Tokes | October 15, 2009 2:58 AM

Hi Alex Williams ,
i think this is a great idea.i like this share point Ul and it's really useful to us.

Posted by: ds r4 | October 22, 2009 10:07 PM