Jive connects its platform to SharePoint

Jive announced this week they were integrating their social media software suite with Microsoft SharePoint, and they had plans to integrate with other leading content management vendors in the coming months including EMC Documentum and IBM FileNet. The idea is to build connections between the social content generated on the Jive platform and the SharePoint repositories where employees often work inside an organization. Jive chose SharePoint because of its ubiquity inside organizations.

Jive Co-founder Bill Lynch says that even though SharePoint has some social tools built into it, they found that very few companies were using those tools. "We talked to customers about this point," he says. "We weren't able to find customers who said the social features [in SharePoint] were very good." Jive research found that only 2 to 3 percent of SharePoint users were using social features, perhaps using My Sites to create a profile. "Our take is in SharePoint, we saw most users draw content in a lot of different places." He adds that customers wanted a more unified view of the organizational content and the social content and the new Jive tools provide this capability in SharePoint.

Lynch says expect to see other connectors in the coming months. "From a technology point of view, we are trying to do broad integration with a big number of content stores. Some of our customers asking about Documentum, then Filenet." He says they are looking for ways to link systems together in broad strokes.

Jive has decided to coin the term social media software, rather than using Enterprise 2.0 because, Ben Kiker, Jive CMO, says "It's software and designed for business, and it's about bringing social capabilities into business." Perhaps it's a more apt moniker and it will be interesting to see if others adopt it moving forward. For now, Jive has a vision of combining its social content with the rest of the organization's content and that's definitely a goal worth pursuing because the content found inside the social interactions in a tool like Jive can be very valuable indeed.

For more information:
- see the Jive press release

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