Getting Excited About Jive SBS 3.0

We're running Jive Clearspace 2.5.x and have been since September 2008. This week Jive released version 3.0, along with a name change: Jive Social Business Software 3.0 (as far as functionality is concerned, it's the next major release of Clearspace -- more on the marketing and positioning in a future post).

I've had a couple of demos with Jive now of SBS 3.0 and I must say I like what I see. Social bookmarking is something I really wanted, so put a checkmark next to that on my wishlist. Not only are individuals going to have a simple, built-in way to save their favorite locations, but teams will, too. The power of sharing bookmarks -- even external ones -- throughout the enterprise is very exciting. It's a social media tool that's proven to be powerful and I expect we'll find real value in it.

I'm most excited about the improved reporting, though. As a community manager, I have been seeking data, actionable data, to understand what's working, what's not, who's participating and how, and who's not. Clearspace 2.5 provides an array or reports, and we've deployed Omniture for web stats, too, but little of the data is what I could truly call actionable. We need it to be more granular, more flexible and more widely available.

I just got a peek at the new Analytics module for Jive SBS 3.0 and as a numbers geek, I'm drooling. Can't wait to get my hands on all that data and connect my old pal Excel to the data warehouse. Just from the examples Jive provided I can see it's got "actionable" written all over it, as well as flexibility in spades. Can't tell, yet, how easy it is to make is widely available, but have my fingers crossed for that, too.

One of my objectives for 2009 is to develop a custom set of actionable data reports. With the Analytics module and the data warehouse that's part of it, it looks like Jive has given me a huge boost toward accomplishing that objective. I still need to get under the hood and test it out, so I'll report what I find when I do that, but from the documentation I have seen so far, this is going to really be useful.