Enterprise Social Networks: Must-Have Features Guide

Jive Software is bringing innovations that first debuted in the cloud to its enterprise social networking software, while also introducing a sales presentation tool for the iPad.

Jive 6 has been available for about two weeks, but it was one of the stars of the company's JiveWorld user conference in Las Vegas this week. It adds a number of "next generation" features first made available in a cloud version of the software aimed at teams of up to 250 people, which was released in May. Jive 6 users can now take advantage of !App Experiences, which are embeddable applications that can be invoked by typing an exclamation mark in the body of a post. Jive has also made it easier to add Jive interactivity to any other website or Web application using a Jive Anywhere browser plugin.

"The workforce doesn't just live in the collaboration system," Jive CEO Tony Zingale said, and when they go out to other websites or Web applications "they want to bring the content from those properties into the conversation." Zingale said a Jive partnership with Box announced this week is also going to be very important for organizations that want to use Jive's social networking in combination with Box's file and document collaboration. Zingale appeared at the Boxworks user conference earlier this week, and Box CEO Aaron Levie returned the favor by appearing at JiveWorld Thursday.

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Other enhancements in Jive 6 include better search and recommendations, the fruit of Jive's 2011 acquisition of big data analytics specialist Proximal Labs. "If you and I were to do a search, we'd get back different sets of results because our behavior in the system is different," Zingale said.

Jive recommendations are based on clues such as business relationships, areas of interest.

The search feature extracts cues about your interests and the projects you are working on to deliver more relevant results, he said.

One new product announcement was Jive Present, an iPad app for salespeople slated for availability in the Apple App Store later this year. Jive Present is a version of the app from Showpad, a Belgian startup, that has been integrated with Jive's platform.

Zingale said the application is one Jive had been using to distribute sales content to its own salespeople and decided would be worthwhile to market, given that sales productivity is one of the primary ways customers use Jive. In addition to serving for a repository for sales documents, images, and videos, Jive provides the platform for feedback on that sales material, he said. "Obviously, what happens when there's a new corporate presentation, people are going to want to comment on how useful it was, or how it sucked, and what worked and what didn't," he said.

Jive is consistently recognized as one of the leaders in enterprise social software in rankings by Gartner and Forrester Research, among others.

Follow David F. Carr on Twitter @davidfcarr. The BrainYard is @thebyard and facebook.com/thebyard

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