Jive is perhaps one the most recognizable names in the enterprise collaboration space and many would argue that they are miles ahead of the competition. However, a part of me wonders if organizations interested in enterprise collaboration are even ready for Jive yet. One of the keys to success for organizations seeking to deploy these collaborative tools (from the vendor standpoint) is ease of use, intuitiveness, and RELEVANT feature set. It seems as though Jive can do almost anything, but is that really what organizations need or want? Many companies are just trying to hang picture frames and Jive is trying to offer the ability to tear down walls.
I’m finding that many times organizations just want a tool that can help them solve a particular problem whereas Jive offers an entire tool-kit, and then some. Penn State chose not to go with Jive not only because they were too expensive but because they were just too complex. Jive wants to be all things to all companies and I’m wondering it that might hurt them in the long run. Jive’s robust feature set might also be their biggest problem. I’ve also spoken to a few vendors last week, several of whom are in the process of taking existing clients AWAY from Jive for precisely that reason. In fact I also heard an interesting story that an un-named organization took just over 9 months to deploy a Jive instance…wow!
Platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have become very successful precisely because they were so simple to use and get started with.
There’s no question that Jive’s feature set is second to none, their analytics is top notch, the platform can be used internally and externally, their mobile functionality is great, and you can also build your own customized apps. All sounds great right? But, I really wonder how much of the Jive functionality is actually being used by organizations deploying these tools; 20% 50%? Organizations are showing plenty of success with tools such as Yammer, Thought Farmer, Confluence, and a host of other more intuitive, MUCH lower cost, and simper to use tools. So why the need for something as robust and complex as Jive? Do you really think that organizations seeking to deploy these tools are asking for and using everything that Jive offers? My guess is no. I also understand that every organization has different needs and goals.
I think a part of the reason that companies go with vendors like Jive is for insurance. Meaning that they want the ability to do some of the things that Jive offers just in case the need might arise in the future. Even though the vast feature set isn’t currently needed, people want those options. Another reason I believe companies go with Jive is because they know that Jive will be around in the future so there is the sense of security that your collaboration platform will still be up and running. Finally, I think that many organizations don’t know what they don’t know. The industry is still not mature and so the first decisions or deployments that organizations make are not always be the best ones. Perhaps as more organization continue to use Jive they will begin transitioning away from them to more intuitive, low cost, and simple to use tools? Or on the flip side, perhaps Jive will continue to make a ton of money and grow!
Is Jive a bad company? No. Does their product suck? I think Jive is actually doing some great things and I’m very impressed with their growth and ambition. But these questions still linger in my mind. What do you think? Am I completely wrong here?
I am involved with another software product that is unrelated to Jive except that it is has a very broad and deep feature set. Or, depending on your opinion, a bloated feature set. What we see is that there is a small set of core features in our product that most people use. Beyond that though, many features are used by only a few people and no-one uses the whole set. The reason why the features are there though is that even though everyone only uses 20% say of the features, each person has a different 20% and everything is used by someone. The way to manage this successfully is to continually focus on usability so that it is easy to discover they things you want and hide the things you don’t. With the right focus and people, a rich feature set does not have to mean complexity.
I work for Jive Software, and just wanted to point out that there is a wealth of information posted by real-world #socbiz practitioners in the comments on Jacob’s original blog post, which can be found here: http://www.jmorganmarketing.com/do-companies-need-jive-software/
It’s a great read for anyone considering the purchase of any Social Business Software, in fact.
I will agree that Jive is probably the best turnkey solution for collaborative environments but still not ideal. The value I see is that it ties all activity into a single user experience versus using separate blog, wiki and forums software. It’s fairly easy to deploy Jive since it’s offered as Software-as-a-Service and has an adequate templating framework though I found it was hard to customize unless you used their services team.
Two things where Jive falls short and to your point, they lack an easily extensible architecture to integrate with things like Twitter, Facebook, social bookmarking and many other evolving social technologies. Secondly the analytics are in my opinion less than optimal. My experience with Jive analytics is that they were only decent for aggregate activity not per user activity other than the Jive rankings. So if you wanted to drill into top posters in a forum or to drill down into users with the most wiki posts they were inadequate.
When I started using Jive I saw a big bump in community activity initially then it leveled off. Bottom line it was a good solution and very reliable though if you want to be cutting edge with your community presence than I think there are no great solutions other than to build your own.
i would also add that Gia who was our project manager and the previous commenter was a great resource and I found the support to be very good as well.