An Enterprise 2.0 Comparison, Part 2
Posted by Matt Rajkowski on March 12, 2010, 2:00 PM EST
In a previous blog, I proclaimed my excitement for Enterprise 2.0 and introduced the story behind Concursive's approach. As I mentioned, I'll now compare ConcourseConnect to Jive SBS.
Concursive's ConcourseConnect enables organizations to create dynamic communities and involve various stakeholders in a collaborative environment. ConcourseConnect is developed by the Concursive Corporation, and Concursive's products are used by large enterprises and thousands of small businesses alike. As Chief Architect of ConcourseConnect, I have intimate knowledge of how it works. I spend a lot of time researching collaboration and over the years I have played a role in designing, deploying and on-boarding various community building tools. So let me tell you about ConcourseConnect and how it compares to the competition.
The first product I want to compare it to is Jive SBS. Jive SBS made a splash in 2009 with the release of its SBS brand. Jive Software is also a private company with thousands of customers. Personally, as an avid user around Jive's social business software, including Clearspace and SBS, I can explain some of the nuances between Jive and ConcourseConnect. I can't be completely objective, but I can provide specific examples to back up my thoughts. I have been a consultant to Fortune 500 and Global 1000 companies using Jive so I have a sense of how large enterprises use it. I have also helped companies migrate off of Jive onto ConcourseConnect and other platforms. The Jive installations that I have seen use community tools like pictures, videos, blogs, documents, and mostly discussion forums.
At a high-level, Connect and Jive both deliver many important elements of Enterprise 2.0, namely blogs, wikis, documents, activity streams and user empowerment. In fact, on the surface the tools are very similar out-of-the-box. Other features similar to both products include: public and private groups, discussion forums, document management capabilities, bookmarks and lists, project management, rich user profiles, searching, customization and ideation (added in ConcourseConnect 1.0 and announced for Jive SBS and soon available).
Instead of focusing on discrete features and putting checkmarks next to names, I've boiled the topics down to something I feel is much more important: How well does the application work?
