Jive is an enterprise collaboration platform designed to facilitate communication and teamwork for businesses. It integrates social networking tools and collaborative features within a secure environment.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| Jive | 1.1% |
| SharePoint | 11.7% |
| Alfresco | 6.7% |
| Other | 80.5% |
| Title | Rating | Mindshare | Recommending | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SharePoint | 3.9 | 11.7% | 79% | 167 interviewsAdd to research |
| Zendesk | 4.0 | N/A | 91% | 69 interviewsAdd to research |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 5 |
| Large Enterprise | 5 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 24 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 23 |
| Large Enterprise | 25 |
Jive enables seamless communication across teams by offering a rich set of collaborative tools. Its focus on enhancing productivity through integrated social networking allows businesses to streamline processes and improve workflow efficiency. Designed for scalability, Jive caters to large enterprises seeking improved communication channels and innovative collaboration features. Its user-centric approach encourages employee engagement and fosters a sense of community within organizations.
What are Jive's most important features?Jive has been successfully implemented in industries like healthcare, where secure communication is vital, and in financial services, providing a platform for knowledge sharing and collaboration. It helps improve internal processes and communication, driving more efficient operations and successful outcomes.
Jive was previously known as Clearspace, Jive SBS, Jive Engage, Jive-x, Jive-n.
Eloqua, Hitachi Data Systems,T-Mobile, UBM, Thomson-Reuters, Groupon, Nike, Cisco, and others.
| Author info | Rating | Review Summary |
|---|---|---|
| VP - International Business at Amtex S.A. | 4.0 | Jive-n enables us to efficiently manage over 100 purchase orders and shipping documents with minimal staff, thanks to its flexible permissions. We find its search and indexing capabilities could be greatly improved. |
| Internal Collaboration Lead at a hospitality company with 1,001-5,000 employees | 4.0 | I find Jive-n excellent for two-way communication, helping us check corporate strategy, especially during our rebranding. Setup was straightforward, and it's stable. However, the mobile app needs improvement, and I wish there were fewer user choices. |
| Managing partner at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees | 4.0 | I found Jive-n excellent for fast affiliate integration and silo breaking, with rich, customizable features and a fair price. However, its backend integration approach limits connection to popular apps, and standard support is not quick enough. |
| Founder/CEO at a computer software company with 51-200 employees | 4.0 | I've used Jive-n for eight years and believe it provides the best curated enterprise social experience, enhancing communication and culture. Jive Cloud has excellent features and support. I strongly recommend Jive Cloud for its dynamic capabilities, focusing on social activation. |
| Senior Associate Social CRM at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees | 3.5 | I valued the permission handling and effective initial collaboration. However, the complex setup, UI design, and major scalability issues with user growth were significant drawbacks, and customer service was moderate. |
| Senior Technical Product Marketing Manager at SnapLogic | 4.0 | I found the platform excellent for collaborative document and media creation, surpassing shared spreadsheets for community building. My main suggestion is to improve bulk user addition by email address. |
| Managing Director Business Change and Quality Assurance at Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island | 4.0 | I've used Jive for five years; its discovery and visual communication benefit my dispersed teams and agile processes. Support and scalability are strong. My main concern is stream activity organization, despite choosing it over SharePoint years ago. |
| Webmaster with 1,001-5,000 employees | 5.0 | I find Jive valuable for sharing and collaboration, greatly improving information flow. Deployment and scalability are excellent, and support is good. However, I'd advise against a 'big bang' adoption; a slower pilot helps users navigate the cultural shift to social collaboration. |
| Business Analyst at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees | 4.0 | No summary available |
| Developer with 51-200 employees | 4.0 | No summary available |
We use Jive-n for followups on details regarding purchase orders, shipping documents, and other information.
We are able to handle more than one hundred POs at any given time with their shipping docs and info, with only one person in charge.
This solution provides great flexibility of permission control within a collaboration platform.
The search engine could be improved and also provide some kind of indexing.
We have been using Jive-n for four years.
Two-way communication between executives and employees.
We recently rebranded our organization and used this tool as our primary channel. The solution allows us to check whether our corporate strategy is landing very quickly. If forces us to change things that aren’t working.
The mobile app could be better. The ability to remove functions would be awesome as there are sometimes too many choices for users.
I have used Jive-n for five years.
We have not had any stability issues.
We have not had any scalability issues.
Technical support is quick.
We were using SharePoint. Users don’t want a day's training to be able to read a blog.
The initial setup was very straightforward. There was good support from Jive.
Start off with one or two real use cases and grow from there.
We implement Jive-n for customers. The main value is silo breaking.
The Jive-n concept of a digital workplace is backend integration. Users see one Jive-n interface and Jive-n makes calls to other systems. This means that Jive-n needs a lot of integration connectors to other systems, and they do that a lot.
But it is not enough for our local market where recognized platforms are popular like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. There is a request to make more and more integrations to third-party products.
When Jive makes an integration – users still see Jive interface, not the App interface. Let’s imagine your company uses Jive as a digital workplace. And you want to add new App into your DW. For Jive, you need to do a lot of backend integration so that the userd still see the Jive activity stream.
The alternative to Jive's approach is visual integration. You make a widget that points to App X and when you click on this widget – it drives you to this App. So if you do visual DW approach – you just need to do a quite simple widget that gets a small bit of info from the App.
We have been using the solution for two years.
It is stable while you don’t make upgrades on new on-premise versions. You definitely need a sandbox to ensure that new upgrades are good.
We did not encounter any issues with stability.
Standard Silver technical support is similar to standard support by all vendors, i.e., not quick enough. You can buy a Gold package to make it faster.
I am not aware of any previous solutions.
We didn't experience any problems during installation. A rich functionality means a rich menu. You need to train new users so that they understand the functionality. As a workaround, you could reduce the number of communication types available to make the menu as simple as you can.
It is a fair price, but first talk to a Jive representative. All the landscapes under Jive-n (databases, OS, etc.) are open source. You don’t have to pay for them.
One of our customers compared Jive-n to IBM Connections and Yammer.
IBMC is too complex and hard to adopt for users.
Yammer was too simple as they needed more functions.
Most intranet platforms use a horizontal+vertical menu approach. Jive-n uses horizontal+horizontal menus. Some people really like that.
Request a Jive-n trial from Jivesoftware.com and show interfaces to decision makers or power sponsors. Even if it is empty, it doesn’t look like it is empty. This way you can achieve a quick “go/not go” understanding.
I have used Jive-n, both as a customer
and as a consultant in other companies. I have used the Jive-n instances
for over the last eight years, across their on-premise, hosted, and cloud
offerings.
Jive-n offers the best curated
experience of the social-based content for enterprises. Companies
that leverage Jive-n as their internal intranet, portal or community
will improve their communication, their culture, and rely less heavily
on emails as the system of participation.
While there is always room
for improvement, Jive Cloud does an excellent job at improving the
features, UX, and extensibility. Jive-n can improve their integration,
plugins and democratize their configuration abilities. They are
actively taking steps in that direction. While Jive-n offers three
levels of hosting, i.e., on-premise, hosted, and cloud, their cloud
version is very dynamic for the needs of the enterprise.
Their technical support is excellent
and well informed in terms of the product.
When I initially selected Jive-n for my
organization eight years ago, there were others in the process. Lithium Technologies was the other front runner. I selected Jive-n
because it was more focused on the curated experience and that
continues to be the case today.
As an on-premise installation, it was
straightforward. However, it does require some serious resources in
order for it to run effectively.
I would suggest to the interested companies to only view Jive Cloud as the solution. This
focus on the cloud as the hosting solution will enable the enterprise to
focus more on activating the social aspects for their employees.
I would also suggest that they negotiate multi-year agreements in order to get the
best pricing policy.
I would say the most valuable feature is the way permissions are handled for different spaces/areas.
Various business groups were able to collaborate effectively using this tool.
I have used it for four years.
I have not encountered any stability issues; the product was stable after the initial set up.
We had major performance issues when our user base went up.
I rate technical support as moderate; we fixed most of the issues internally.
Initial setup is complex. You need to have a Jive expert in order to set up the product; need to understand and follow the Jive architecture in order to set up various components for the Jive environment.
Analyze what is really required for your business and install only those components. If your business doesn’t need many modifications to the OOTB product, going for the cloud solution would be a good option.
The platform works well to collaborate with creating documents or media for a specific goal.
It was more fun to create a community in Jive than to use shared spreadsheets in Dropbox or Google docs.
Create a better way of adding users in bulk by email address.
Discovery, meaning that the more it's used, the more you find someone else has solved an issue you have, or has the same interest. This helps to reduce lifecycle times. The second feature is the pictures. For a geographically dispersed organization, knowing what a person looks like increases trust immediately.
It's used by our agile teams instead of email to track impediments. It's easy to onboard new associates to a group or a technology program, and it helps facilitate communication outwards to communities of interests.
Stream activity could be better organized. Activities or content you are following will either be emailed to you or you follow in a stream. This is the largest issue to overcome for new people using the solution. When using email they receive way too many and it becomes noise. If they use streams, it's yet another thing to check along with email, IM, etc.
I've used it for approximately five years.
The deployment teams needs to be trained on this product first. After that the deployment issues are specific to the environment it's being deployed to.
No stability issues. They have improved their redundancy solutions so it's an active active solution.
Scalability can be managed thru either server utilization monitoring or thru their admin portal. Either will show growth in usage that be the leading indicator to add more capacity.
They have a couple different models. First is their online community. It's an active community with both Jive Software and community members responding. For large enterprise they provide custom support which is negotiated.
Technical Support:Excellent technical support. Most of the infrastructure is open source (Lucene for example). Their technical staff is large enough to respond thoroughly.
We decided to use Jive Software approximately five to seven years ago. We compared SharePoint and IBM Connections with Jive. Jive came out on top for feature, price, and ability to meet regulatory needs.
It's straightforward based on their documentation and knowledge of their product.
We installed it in-house while we also leveraged professional services from Jive for the more complex areas which were specific to the regulatory solution we needed.
Ensure the licensing fits the sponsorship model needed. Pricing will come after that. Like all negotiations, make sure you have the right person negotiating. Vendors always have the upper hand.
The company I worked with completed their evaluation a very long time ago. Looking at the market place now I would recommend evaluation of Jive, SharePoint O365. Make sure your use cases are prioritized for the evaluation. Also determine how this fits into your broader computing ecosystem. If you are an Microsoft shop, SharePoint has been fit, although Jive has plugin to Microsoft products to make it easier. If you are an all Google shop, you might want to consider Jive or even Google new social product.
Make sure you have executive sponsorship and they will participate. Have a strong community leader to drive up adoption. Start small with specific use cases and ways of measuring success and grow from there.
Blogging, sharing, search, mobile use Full integration of MS Office and Outlook
Colleagues are more informed, easier to find content, silo breaking
A visual navigator would be very useful as many colleagues have an issue to find their way and connect the dots
2 years 1 month
When we deployed 2 years ago we had some issues but the move from Jive 5 to 7 this July worked seamlessly and smoothly
We are using 6 nodes and only one of them had some stability issues.
None, even after two years the system is very fast
Jive and the Community has always been available to support us in all questions.
Technical Support:Considering the fact that their tech support for Europe is based in London and all support questions are handled via the Jive Community we are very happy.
Being a public Administration with over 50 units it has always been very difficult to know what other units were doing, even if some of them worked on similar issues. Files were saved on ShareDrives and to find content on our old html (Frontpage) based intranet was at best very time consuming with little results. In 2012 we had a major reorganisation and our CEO wanted to accompany this switch with a modern Social Collaboration platform. The decision to use Jive as Intranet was practically taken over night and we went from a slow two unit pilot to a big bang approach, including shutting down the old intranet.
Very easy and straight forward. Some minor issues
Inhouse (with on side support from Jive)
Blue Kiwi, Hubble,...
In the beginning the big bang approach brought some problems for the NON-"Facebook" users, finding it very difficult to understand the concept of linking, sharing, following. I would not go for a big bang and rather guide users via a slow pilot approach. The big issue for us was the cultural shift from static to social. It needs a dedicated team of Community managers and the clear support from Management.
Our team uses a tool called Jive Software for our collaboration needs. We use it to get work done and we also use it to connect with our customers. I recently spoke at the Milwaukee CIO conference and highlighted how we’ve been successful using the tool.
Five benefits of Jive:
At Mediacurrent we often get requests to compare Drupal to other platforms used for intranet sites and social business platforms (like https://dev.twitter.com/ for example). This is often referred to as “Social Business Software”, which has grown in popularity in recent years. I decided to do a round-up of a couple of the more well known platforms and compare their products to Drupal.
In this roundup we will be comparing Jive, Sharepoint and Drupal Commons. Drupal Commons is a popular distribution created by Acquia to compete with some of these other proprietary platforms.
There are many other options out there, commercial and otherwise, to compare with Drupal but I want to focus on Jive and Sharepoint for a couple of reasons. I chose Jive because it is one of the leading competitors in this space in respect to market share. Next, I chose Sharepoint because I have some history with Sharepoint. This experience dates back to when I built www.adhe.edu with Sharepoint 2007 a few years ago. I subsequently wrote this blog entry about my experience shortly after joining Mediacurrent. This roundup will also act as a refresher for those who read my original “Drupal vs. Sharepoint” blog. Yammer, which was recently bought by Microsoft and is the tool we currently use for office communication will also get some mentions throughout this article.
As I went through and tested each of these tools I used three main criteria in my evaluation:
There are many other factors I could have included, but these are the factors that stand out to me the most.
I want to see the bottom line of how much does this product costs compared to it’s competitors. Drupal, being open-source, does not get a free pass as you still have to pay for the labor to produce the end product.
How flexible is this product? What can be customized? Can you extend this software using code or implementing an API? It’s possible that this is not as important to some organizations as others. For example if you use Yammer, you might be satisfied with it’s out of the box feature set and do not have a need to do any sort of customization. On the other hand, our clients are often seeking very customized solutions that can fit their specific business needs. So if a product is difficult or expensive to customize, this can be a real sticking point.
In my evaluation, I not only played around with the software, I also read up on it, looking at several reviews. I tried my best to gather the big selling points for each product. Maybe the big selling point is that the product is feature-rich and intuitive out of the box. Maybe it’s that the software easily integrates with other products. I tried to take stock of what were the biggest features that each product had to offer when I was testing each platform.
As I review each platform I will offer some advice for when I think the product is best suited for a particular use case. I do not want to give the impression that this is just a blog where I stack the deck against Jive and Sharepoint in order to declare Drupal the winner. I think most agree that some solutions work better for some organizations than they do others. Even as I acknowledge my own bias already leans towards Drupal, I will really try to be fair to the other products in this review.
To review Jive I went to the website and signed up for a free trial at https://www.jivesoftware.com/try-jive/. I must admit that I tried to see if there were multiple versions of the software, or add-ons I needed to be aware of. I was somewhat confused by the Jive product offerings. To make a long story short I decided that I would just focus on what the trial gives me, which I am assuming is Jive’s main flagship product.
The pricing is very easy to understand. It is also pretty expensive. Looking at https://www.jivesoftware.com/try-jive/ you have to pay $12 per user, per month and an annual contract is required. That is for the base package, it’s $18/mo for some extra features and ostensibly even more for large organizations (thus the “call for pricing” option). So at a minimum for a 25-person company, you will be paying $625/mo and are locked into yearly contracts. Total cost comes to $7,500 a year. Per user pricing gets very expensive very fast. When I see pricing like this my next thought is that this product really needs to blow me away with features. There are always competitors that are willing to offer similar features that are either free or much cheaper, so the bar was set pretty high from the get-go.
I was very impressed with the ability to customize Jive from within the site itself. There were some really intuitive tools for branding the site and customizing the layout/features for certain sections of the site, like project or group pages (see screenshots below).
Tool for customizing a group homepage layout
Tool to customize branding/styling of the overall Jive site
You can also add apps to the Jive platform which extends its functionality. There appeared to be at least a few dozen at the time of this writing. There is a nice developer site for creating Jive apps but I could not figure out if you can write apps just for your particular organization. This page alludes to that functionality existing but I could not figure it out.
For some organizations this level of customization will suffice. On the other hand many enterprise organizations will want more advanced customization. For those organizations I believe that Jive will accommodate, but you will run into more costs. Acquia, which created Commons, has written several articles challenging Jive and so you might want to check out this article regarding some pitfalls.
Jive really feels like the Cadillac of intranet portals. It’s feature-rich, intuitive and even enjoyable to use. In no time I was able to “get around” and figure out how to add content. There was so much inline help along the way. I had no problem adding people, creating groups and projects, blogs -- all of the social content you would expect on a platform such as this. It’s all presented in a way that is very user-friendly (as easy as Facebook to me). This is important as the idea behind a product like this is that everyone in the organization is using it. A “social business” product that’s too hard to use will not be very useful.
Homepage of my trial account
The project management tools are pretty interesting. I know for our organization we use another Drupal product (Open Atrium) which allows for a high level of detail for a particular task. This does not appear to reach that level of detail but I think would be a good choice for companies that like having a Basecamp-like feature-set within their business portal. The upside for me again and again is just how easy everything feels.
Another feature I like is the ability to download Jive as an app on your smartphone or tablet. The site itself is not responsive but the fact that there is an app mitigates that issue for me.
One feature I found lacking would be the ability to have a public facing site that is a portal. For example, let’s say you want to create a community site for your business (like https://community.jivesoftware.com/), using Jive as your platform. I could not figure out how to do this. Maybe this is an add-on or an enterprise feature. I am sure the pricing tiers would have to be different so maybe this is an enterprise solution they offer. You can invite external users to interact with you in Jive, but at least on the $12/person plan I do not believe there is any way to have public facing pages.
To me Jive looks like a solid product that is also extremely expensive. When I look at the feature-set and compare it to another popular product, Yammer, I think “can’t I do a large percentage of what I want to do with Yammer that I can do with Jive?” My feeling is that yes I can.
If I can’t do enough of what I want, I would still shop around for other products with similar features and lower pricing. The sticker price seems to demand more for the money when there are so many similar product offerings out there. This is all relative, so for enterprise organizations the costs compared to some other products might be reasonable. I will leave it up to your business to crunch the numbers to see if this product could work for you.
