An Enterprise 2.0 Comparison, Part 2

Posted by Matt Rajkowski on March 12, 2010, 2:00 PM EST

In a previous blog, I proclaimed my excitement for Enterprise 2.0 and introduced the story behind Concursive's approach. As I mentioned, I'll now compare ConcourseConnect to Jive SBS.

Concursive's ConcourseConnect enables organizations to create dynamic communities and involve various stakeholders in a collaborative environment. ConcourseConnect is developed by the Concursive Corporation, and Concursive's products are used by large enterprises and thousands of small businesses alike. As Chief Architect of ConcourseConnect, I have intimate knowledge of how it works. I spend a lot of time researching collaboration and over the years I have played a role in designing, deploying and on-boarding various community building tools. So let me tell you about ConcourseConnect and how it compares to the competition.

The first product I want to compare it to is Jive SBS. Jive SBS made a splash in 2009 with the release of its SBS brand. Jive Software is also a private company with thousands of customers. Personally, as an avid user around Jive's social business software, including Clearspace and SBS, I can explain some of the nuances between Jive and ConcourseConnect. I can't be completely objective, but I can provide specific examples to back up my thoughts. I have been a consultant to Fortune 500 and Global 1000 companies using Jive so I have a sense of how large enterprises use it. I have also helped companies migrate off of Jive onto ConcourseConnect and other platforms. The Jive installations that I have seen use community tools like pictures, videos, blogs, documents, and mostly discussion forums.

At a high-level, Connect and Jive both deliver many important elements of Enterprise 2.0, namely blogs, wikis, documents, activity streams and user empowerment. In fact, on the surface the tools are very similar out-of-the-box. Other features similar to both products include: public and private groups, discussion forums, document management capabilities, bookmarks and lists, project management, rich user profiles, searching, customization and ideation (added in ConcourseConnect 1.0 and announced for Jive SBS and soon available).

Instead of focusing on discrete features and putting checkmarks next to names, I've boiled the topics down to something I feel is much more important: How well does the application work?

To answer that question, I touch on the data itself, the level of effort required for launching the community, and the software platform.

What is the data?

This may sound like a strange question, but when you use an Enterprise 2.0 application, you ought to be able to consistently navigate, find, share and discover information as you go.

What I like about Connect is the way data is organized. Connect was built from the ground-up using rich profiles. From the beginning you decide what types of profiles you want: People, Places, Things, Events, Groups, Projects, Ideas, Departments, or whatever your organization decides to use. Each of these types can have any number of listings… for example, under Departments you can have HR Department and IT Department. Then each of those departments can have a blog, wiki, forum, and other Enterprise 2.0 features. Using a directory of profiles creates organization in an otherwise freeform system which means the user will be working in a consistent environment -- easier to learn, quicker to share knowledge. And moving from one department to another is very consistent. Not only is the data organized well, but the access controls around the data have existed from the start. Users only see what they have access to. When users are naturally linked to other profiles (people, places, things, projects, departments, etc.) then the access is naturally extended as well.

Jive doesn't begin with central profiles. Instead, the organizing freeform element (which is good in Web 2.0 technologies or a content management systems) is a web page container -- a dynamic web page where users can place widgets for all sorts of stuff and link those to other web pages. An emphasis on user flexibility, which is good for Web 2.0, is not so good for Enterprise 2.0. Jive later added spaces and categories to organize data, but as an afterthought, which shows the challenge they had in creating an organizing structure. The reason I feel this flexibility is bad, is because the user experience in Jive is awkward and confusing. Navigation literally disappears as you venture into various topics, only to find there is no way back out except to start over. Jive's documentation says about spaces and categories, "Use a space to group multiple concepts or functional areas; use a category to group together discrete concepts within a space." To me that's really confusing! Furthermore, there isn't a cohesive user experience, and that bothers me as an information architect. Connect does a better job of organizing data and enforcing access controls.

Launching the Community

The mantra with Jive is that 'everything can be customized,' however it really should be 'everything must be customized.' All around, the widgets in Jive show off the flexibility of the product, but that flexibility brings with it increased complexity in launching and maintaining Jive, as well as keeping employees productive. I have seen sites remain on old beta versions of Jive just because the cost to upgrade, both in terms of money and resources, prevented the continual updates to the software. Be careful with customizing Jive because keeping a consistent user experience is challenging.

So what does Connect do differently? From the start, Connect is very easy to get started with. There are a few basic choices for defining the community and because of the way the data is organized, your community can evolve without affecting the existing data.

Connect uses Java portlet technology while Jive uses home grown Java widgets which are based on a templating engine. The benefit of using portlets is that the specification includes a lot of capability and interoperability, which widgets do not have, but one day might as the widget platform grows and developers push the envelope. Specifically, Connect portlets are essentially standalone web applications that integrate into a portal. The portlets can be deployed with Connect or they can be deployed on a remote server with realtime integration into running Connect communities. In Connect, portlets can be placed on most any page, or a page all by itself. Widgets on the other hand run on top of the application and are limited to the underlying platform for placement and usage. I stress Java portlet technology because it is a proven technology that enterprises are familiar with. If the developer can write a Java web application, or a simple Java web page, then turning it into a portlet is painless, and seeing the portlets deployed remotely in realtime is like magic.

Platform Philosophy

Organizing information, and platform flexibility, are both key differentiators in a social collaboration platform. Another key differentiator is in platform philosophy.

Connect is Open Source in which much of the source code is available on the internet for free, and in which developers analyze, make changes and redistribute their changes. Users have been given the complete 1.0 platform, with over 6,000 downloads on Sourceforge.net and Google Code, and we hope they have done some fun things with it. The source code is generally available after customers have had a chance to break it in. These customers generally are the ones that pay for the improvements, so for them to get it first seems poetic. Concursive does have proprietary plug-ins for load balancing, community management, CRM integration, remote portlets and multi-tenancy.

Jive's code, on the other hand is completely proprietary, but can be licensed by companies if they want to access the source code. While the core of Jive is proprietary, Jive does offer some freely available plug-ins with source code. Recently I was able to find plug-in examples that were last updated during August of 2008. These are not very useful in my opinion because these plug-ins really don't share any of the insight into the development of Jive and are just low-lying fruit. I believe Jive does this because they want developers to be interested in developing additional plug-ins, which creates lock-in. The example plug-ins include delicious, bliptv, facebook, jira, jotlet, microsoft sharepoint, vimeo, yahoo maps, and youtube. I have not been trained by Jive so they might have other resources available to paying customers.

Summary

For starters, don't believe the marketing hype. Be sure to request a pilot system so that you can experience the tool with a small group of people. After 30 days, if your group has made progress, then expand the tool to more people.

In part 1 I recommend reading the book Enterprise 2.0, and in that book you will learn about the power of collective intelligence and alleviate concerns about taking the next step forward with Enterprise 2.0.

Good luck, and if you need advice please feel free to contact the team here at Concursive Corporation or send me a message. If you want to point out anything I may have missed (I switched from Jive a long time ago so I'm not entirely current), then please comment and let us all know. If you support my claims, then vote for this blog!

Best Regards,
Matt Rajkowski

There is 1 comment

Comments

I read all three of Matt's blog posts on comparing Enterprise 2.0 as a concept to basic social media tools in mass markets today, as well as the specific second post on comparing a specific Enterprise 2.0 application, Concursive's Concourse Connect, to Jive. All were extremely well-written and the links to the Enterprise 2.0 blog posts provided very good background and context by which to fully understand Matt's points.

Much of the current writing and evaluation, prognostication and predictions around social computing, Enterprise 2.0, social media, social business technology and on and on are still mostly from the perspective of advanced technologists and system innovators. There is still need for business reengineering experts, marketing innovators, and others who are less technical in their focus, less academic and more focused on the fact that all critical organizational activities, and especially those crossing traditional organizational boundaries, are inherently communications and people based. So as we see more business process redesign experts beginning to enter the fray, then we should see more adoption on these technologies, and more emphasis on scaling and functionality and privacy and the like. This may happen as companies and organizations begin to ask the main question, "what is next after the dozen or so social media tools that can help me fundamentally increase productivity, quality, speed to market and so forth?".

Joe Antle

1 decade ago

ConcourseConnect