The simple creation and distribution of content like Blog-Postings, Status Updates, discussion in spaces, social groups and projects is the greatest strength of Jive. Commenting and rating is easy and well integrated throughout the whole platform. Extensive forum functionality is available in all workspaces (spaces, groups, projects), threads are easily manageable and posts can be explicitly marked as questions. Besides the central activity stream exists the custom activity streams, which is faster and more precise by structuring the content. The new function Jive Anywhere supports the user by sharing content of any website and initiation of a discussion or recognizing if there is already content on the platform that belongs to a website. The app-mentions function integrates the content of apps and enriches the created content with information and important links. With these the utilization ratio and the quality of content get raised. The availability of content on mobile user devices creates the possibility of access, which is still established in the internet.

Besides corporate conversation, the real strength of Jive is Networking and Expert Search. The profiles are well structured and contain a great deal of information including biographical background, expertise, groups and a reference to the personal blog. A tag cloud with the user’s most frequently used tags provides a quick overview about work focus and interests. Unlike competing products, Jive allows for a convenient one-way following mechanism, which is known from twitter. Each employee can be displayed in an organizational chart and suggests similar people when visiting a profile. Any keyword search will suggest matching experts and the advanced people search enables users to search people by tags, titles, department and more. Nevertheless we see potential in a more intelligent expert search. Well-engineered profile and data privacy gave the user the chance to decide, which information in the personal profile appear and should visible for other users.

Project management on a basic level is well supported in Jives Social Business Software. It is possible to set up a project workspace which includes a project blog, a project forum and a list of shared documents. Though it is possible to aggregate a bunch of widgets, including a project calendar, a progress bar and a summary of the project tasks on the customizable project dashboard, the functionality behind that cannot satisfy high demands. Jive improved features of PM with the possibility to integrate more PM-Applications with apps. For example: there is a JIRA-integration for the issues tracking. Furthermore external groups for participants, which are not in the company, can be created and invited to the project work.

Jive SBS is available either as an on-premise solution, an externally hosted SaaS or within Jive Cloud. It is comparably easy to install and supports a wide range of operating systems and databases. Clustering is supported and scalability is reported to be unproblematic also in big company deployments with a couple of thousand users. Additional Jive provides an Office and Outlook integration as well as a range of plugins and apps for customizing. Besides enhanced content by e-mail functionality for all mobile phones and especially RIMs Blackberrys, a powerful native iPhone application was developed. An integration of SharePoint is available with the SharePoint Connector.

Jive supports various LDAP providers including Microsoft’s Active Directory for basic authentication. The access permissions are set on the workspace level and administrators can configure read-, write-and view-access on a very detailed level. With new function external groups Jive provides an area where standard community users can work with people from outside the community, external contributors.

Jive extends the Service and Support Struktur increasingly. Over the jive community the costumer obtains entry for support. Every customer has to set its own community with the possibility their Issues. In addition he receives a Jive Engagement Manager. In the US, Jive relies on a number of partners. For technical- and business consulting, they are working together with specialized partners. Support is guaranteed to respond within a business day; immediate 24/7 support is possible but causes additional costs. Since version 2.5, they provide a good online documentation, which is publicly available, along with some whitepapers on best practices. A growing community of implementers and developers is active on the Jive homepage (http://www.jivesoftware.com/jivespace/community/developer). New high quality product releases appear on a regular basis every half a year.