A Journey In Social Media: Reactions to Clearspace 2.5

Well, the big news today is that Jive launched the latest version of Clearspace 2.5

And -- if anything -- I feel vindicated that we picked the right product and the right company when we got started on this a year or so ago.

Now, I haven't done any hands-on yet, but here's what I can see so far:

Are They Psychic?

As I looked through all the new functionality, it was almost like they were going down a punchlist of things I've wanted for a while. Now, very few features are actually a "surprise". The surprise factor comes from seeing the closed loop process: Jive asks us for feedback, we tell them what's important to us and why, and -- lo and behold -- something similar shows up in announced product before too long.

Seeing that closed-loop process at work is nothing short of amazing, so congratulations, folks ...

Key Features

All sorts of goodness here.

The email integration features is sorely needed in our environment. We needed the ability for people to work in email, and not only get copies of discussions, but to post content as well. I only got a brief glimpse at the feature setup, but it looks very promising.

The ability to use Clearspace as a "discuss this" enhancement for our vast collection of legacy web pages (both inside and outside) looks extremely useful. We get a two-fer: not only do we get a valuable upgrade for our legacy pages, but we get new feeds into the community.

Not being a touchy-feely guy, I probably didn't appreciate the "connections" feature as much as some people would, but I do know that many of our users will want this cool abilty to connect and categorize their many relationships in our growing social universe.

The text editor appears to have been fixed. I will reserve judgment on this one until I'm running production code, but -- at a minimum -- Jive heard all of our pitiful wails regarding this painful bit of code, and has invested in something better.

Jive is also claiming a performance improvement of roughly 2x. Not that we're having performance problems per se, it's just that I notice that things get incrementally more sluggish with each passing month. I see this as more of a function of increased usage, rather than a specific issue with the Jive product.

I would believe that performance is one of those issues that Jive will have to keep after in every release. The more your product gets used, the more important performance becomes. Trust me on this.

Bottom Line

I really like what I see -- not only in the product, but in the company.

I've been very pleased with our Clearspace / Jive experience up to now -- and now I have every reason to expect it'll even get better in the future.

Great job, guys!