I have been looking at IBM Lotus connections recently and I must say that its a pretty impressive product. As compared to Jive’s Clearspace, its generally the same but I am sure Sam would would be able to tell us more about the in depth difference. I think the final decision between the top few products in the market (IBM Lotus connections, Jive’s Clearspace, ThoughtFarmer or SocialText) would really boil down to cost, maintenance and support.
One thing I really do not understand about IBM connections is that it doesn’t have private or public messaging capabilities.
1) It doesn’t have the Facebook’s status (i.e. Sean is writing a blog at the moment and wondering why Connections doesn’t have this functionality). This might not be that important but the next one is.
2) It doesn’t have facebook’s “the wall”. I can’t write a message to one person or a selected group of people! Come’on if this is a social platform, its about communication and sending a message would probably be one of the most common way of communication. I would expect a few messaging capabilities a) public message to one person b) public message to a group of people c) private messaging. I would also expect a event calendar / invite functionality but this is really secondary and would be a “nice to have”
If anyone from IBM is reading this and disagree with me, feel free to educate me. I might be wrong here and glad to learn from anyone. Also if you are from Jive, ThoughtFarmer or SocialText, please feel free to let me know your differentiating factors/features.
9 responses so far ↓
1 Gia Lyons // Jul 2, 2008 at 3:00 am
Hi, former IBM Lotus Connections evangelist here, now Social Enterprise Evangelist at Jive.
I will cut the marketing and selling crap, and get to the point:
Lotus Connections is intended to be a social networking layer over existing collaborative environments. IBM’s approach is to weave Connections into a customer’s established collaboration platform, regardless of what vendor it came from. It is certainly also able to stand by itself, with no integration elsewhere. Read Luis Benitez’s blog for details (I’ll let you find him on your own.
Jive Clearspace was originally a community-building and collaboration platform, complete with profiles, wiki pages, file sharing, blogs, projects, spaces (public and private), email and RSS “watches”, and with the 2.0 release earlier this year, and the 2.1 release in a few weeks, you will see many more social networking capabilities (I’d tell you what they are, but I’m not supposed to yet, dangit.)
The features you describe will most likely end up in ALL 2.0 products at some point, so they’re really not differentiators, IMO.
Now, to directly answer your question about what differentiates Jive: Our software definitely has unique features, but it’s most valued “feature”, as described by our customers who are using it inside their enterprise, is this:
*Usability*
Our F100 customers, interviewed over a period of four weeks in April, told us that we nailed Usability, and to “please don’t mess it up.” They don’t have to train people to use Clearspace.
The other differentiator is this:
Jive is focused not only on getting the technology right inside an enterprise (e.g., during a POC or pilot), but we also have a new program around user adoption strategy planning, led by me. This second thing is really the harder of the two. The software should fade into the background, should become, in the words of one of our large Midwestern manufacturing customers, “like air. We don’t notice it’s there until it’s gone.”
So, there you have it.
2 Gia Lyons // Jul 2, 2008 at 3:04 am
I should add, so that I don’t get harassed by my colleagues, this:
Jive Clearspace includes Web, REST, and XML-RPC services so that customers can weave it’s capabilities into existing collaboration (and even non-collaboration) environments as well.
We also offer Community Everywhere, which makes it crazy-simple to add Clearspace discussions to any HTML page. Clearspace discussions include the ability to rate helpful and correct answers, and to award points to those who provide them. I will blog about this tomorrow.
3 Chris McGrath // Jul 2, 2008 at 4:08 am
Hi Sean,
Jive’s Clearspace, Lotus Connections, SocialText and ThoughtFarmer all have large feature sets, and I’m sure effective collaboration can and does take place on all of them.
I’ll second what Gia says above — “user adoption strategy planning” has more of an impact on the success of the new collaboration platform than the technology does.
All 4 of the products you mention, us included, make grandiose claims on their web sites about usability. Without a vendor-neutral professional usability evaluation, any claim I make about ThoughtFarmer’s ease of use will ring hollow. However, I will say that the heritage of each system is definitely evident in the user interface. Clearspace has its roots in discussion forums (from their site: “Jive’s legacy is rooted in developing robust java discussion forum software”). SocialText has its roots in pure-bred wikis (”the first wiki company”). ThoughtFarmer has its roots in intranets (co-created by intranet consultancy One Intranets).
Because of its intranet roots, ThoughtFarmer is a great choice for companies that want to replace an outdated intranet with enterprise 2.0 technology. And from an IT perspective, it’s the only one of the four you list that is a native Microsoft application, so it’s ideal for IT environments where Active Directory is the authentication system and SQL Server is the preferred database.
Hope that helps.
4 Sean Lew // Jul 2, 2008 at 10:05 am
Thanks Gia, Chris. I am honoured that you guys responded and so quickly. Both of you provided excellent points and a different perspective of how I traditionally looked at your product. Thanks heaps.
5 Suzanne Minassian // Jul 2, 2008 at 12:43 pm
Sean, first thanks for trying out Connections and sharing your feedback. We have a lot of functionality which you can read about and see on our blog in more depth. The capabilities you mentioned are in line with what we’re planning for the product. I welcome you to share your experience with Connections directly with me and the product team. We bring customer feedback into the planning process VERY early on and really work with our customers to shape the product to their needs.
We also use the product internally - and have been for long before Connections could even be purchased - in the diverse and massive IBM environment, so we know how to deal with security and scalability quite well. Our open Atom based rest api makes it easy to create plugins from the environments people use on a day to day basis - like email, instant messaging, even enterprise search - and this fuels adoption. Lastly, we have a tremendous research organization who studies how people use technology and what we can benefit from on the enterprise side. Much of what is in Connections is based on research - you can read more about that in my blog. Several more of our research projects are resonating with our customer base as well and therefore are finding their way into our product. This means customers get to leverage new technologies that have *already* proven their value. Having started at IBM Research, this is very compelling to us as a company and to our customers who want to know if certain technologies have a relevance to their business.
I can share more with you depending on what you want to get out of your deployment; feel free to reach out.
6 luis benitez // Jul 2, 2008 at 1:51 pm
Hi Sean,
Probably not the answer you want to hear (and I agree), but today, you can easily add a Wall widget and a status widget to the Profiles page. The caveat? You would have to build the widget yourself using a tool such as Lotus Widget Factory.
But stay tuned… good things are coming!
7 Sean Lew // Jul 2, 2008 at 2:44 pm
Hi Suzanne, Hi Luis,
Thanks for your comments.
When I was presented with IBM connections I was very impressed. I have heard sales pitches from other collaboration software vendors and Connections is for sure one of the top few solutions. As I said on my blog, the messaging function is something critical to such a platform.
@Luis, I agree with you but would mean I need to buy Websphere Lotus Widget Factory. Not ideal to me for sure.
Other than that shortfall, I can’t see anything else that is not good. Great work guys @ IBM.
8 Ross Mayfield // Jul 3, 2008 at 5:59 am
Thanks for taking a look at us. Sure we have tool differentiation like SocialCalc, People, Dashboard, mobile and offline. But the previous comments are spot on that its the practices that get value, not just adoption, out of the tool.
We have a five year track record in professional services. Its not a big part of our revenue, but a different engagement model that leads to customer success and intimacy that translates into a better product. Check out our solution areas and talk with our VP of Professional Services that used to run McKinsey’s knowledge management and technologies practice.
Also, to the point of the rest of this post, we have a partnership with Lotus Connections.
9 Sean Lew // Jul 3, 2008 at 12:13 pm
Thanks Ross! SocialText is a great tool as well. In fact, I am using your personal free edition of socialtext for one of my personal projects.
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