A week or so ago I wrote about MindTouch and their take on social business software, including that popularized by vendors such as Jive. Some of what Aaron from MindTouch writes about applies to Jive, while some does not — if only because Jive does not include microblogging, instant messaging or really much of any mashup capability out of the box. It’s also not easy to hook Jive into existing Web tools, so Jive tends to be a Web 2.0 ‘introvert’ by default. Conversely, MindTouch lets vasts swaths of your organization create mashups that bring the best of the Web together with data from your own systems.
Jive strikes me as a tool that’s a jack of all trades and master of none. What I mean is that it does document management, but not as well as SharePoint. It’s a wiki, but one that’s not as good as MindTouch’s. It claims to be social business software, but there is no built-in Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, chat or even instant messaging capability. It has social bookmarking, but it still lacks the community mojo of Facebook or Twitter. Making matters worse, it doesn’t have Outlook or Microsoft Office adapters (unlike MindTouch or even startup Infovark), so Jive users are forced to choose between using these established business tools and Jive’s parallel, wiki-only approach. There’s also no real integration with Salesforce.com or other existing enterprise systems.
Even apart from taking a social business software approach, Jive’s more basic Achilles heel seems to be that it lacks many extensions, and thus offers really basic functionality. You’ll get blogs, wikis, comments, groups and even rudimentary project management, but not much by way of workflow, mashups and dashboards that show real ROI. If my CEO or CFO were to ask me for a sales dashboard for Jive, for example, I’d be hard pressed to provide him with one. Jive seems to stub its toe on the ‘So what?’ question that business owners like to ask about the value of new tools. (If you want dashboards for BI, you’ll need to use another tool from SAP that then integrates with Jive — at a considerable extra cost — or some other back-end reporting tool.)
On the other hand, what intrigues me about MindTouch is that it focuses on getting the most from existing systems. If you’re an organization that uses Salesforce, MindTouch can provide you with CEO-friendly dashboards, using real-time data, without the need to generate static reports. If you want to integrate Twitter, no worries. Google Maps? Check. LinkedIn? Yes. Outlook and Office? Of course.
Oh, and your data is 100% portable, so there’s no vendor lock-in. MindTouch seems to be built to use communication and collaboration as a means to an end, and not as an end unto themselves. Jive seems to have assumed that more sharing and communication would automatically generate greater — and easy-to-calculate — ROI, but this doesn’t seem to be the case — hence their partnership with SAP.
What do you think? Has your mileage varied with Jive or even MindTouch?
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