Jive Software has released version 2.0 of Clearspace, its collaboration suite for businesses. The company is also announcing that it has acquired Jotlet, makers of online calendar software.
Jive provides two products with the Clearspace name, both of which run on the same platform. The one getting upgraded is simply known as “Clearspace” and is used by businesses for internal collaboration purposes. This means holding discussions, sharing and working on documents, blogging, running polls, organizing projects, handling group tasks, and more. The other product is called “Clearspace Community” and consists of software that businesses can use to communicate with customers and the broader community.
Clearspace 2.0 has been upgraded in 5 primary ways. There are more social networking features that employees can use to learn about each others’ professional activities. The experience is more iGoogle-y, with lots of drag-n-drop modules that can be added and removed for customization purposes.
Jive has also built out what it’s calling an XMPP cloud that essentially gives outsiders access to particular sections of a Clearspace community. For example, if you are organizing a project using Clearspace (another new capability), you can invite partners from other companies to join you for just those projects. This feature exposes Clearspace to those who haven’t seen it before and gives it a viral edge.
Over the coming year, Jive will incorporate Jotlet’s technology into Clearspace to beef up its calendaring functionality. The company says it acquired Jotlet because it had a good API and integrated well with Outlook.
Jive claims that it now has over 2,000 customers, which includes 15% of the Fortune 500. It likes to explicitly pit Clearspace up against Microsoft SharePoint, which it says focuses more on file sharing than true collaboration. Clearspace, which is based on Java, comes as both a hosted and an on-premise solution, and is free for 5 people to try out. Additional seats are $59/year up to a certain size before enterprise pricing kicks in.
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