January 03, 2007, 5:06 PM — Listen to the column "Clearspace", or visit our Podcast Center to hear more by James Gaskin.
Back in October we talked about Jive Software (.com) and their Open Source Enterprise Instant Messaging product WildFire. Now let's talk about a new product they'll release next month named Clearspace. They're attempting to rework corporate collaboration by harnessing internal blogs and wikis and contact profiles, then stirring in some workflow attributes.
Jive Software spokesman Sam Lawrence showed me around the Clearspace application that was supposed to be a secret until next month. Leveraging their experience building Instant Messaging and support forums, Jive wants to tie everything together in a single interface that's flexible enough to allow users to change their minds regularly, but still track the information. Want to create a wiki on a subject? One click and some details. Want to lock that wiki so only a few people can make changes? A few more clicks and details. Want to save that wiki as a knowledgebase document that can't be changed? Couple more clicks. Hyperlinks to other documents? Click.
To me, those are the key advantages to Clearspace, or at least the potential advantages, since we can't play with it yet. Create a document such as a blog, share that by making it a wiki, decide not everyone should change it by restricting rights, then change it to a forum so everyone can chime in. People change their minds constantly and projects take different turns, and Clearspace will support those changes flexibly.
The typical problem with contained workflow applications comes when people accidentally, or on purpose, start using e-mail to communicate outside the collaboration framework. One document escaping via e-mail can crash months of carefully constructed workflow, and is often done as passive-aggressive sabotage. Workflow systems that don't use external e-mail fail, because people love e-mail.
Clearspace includes a variety of change notification options, including e-mail, RSS, and Instant Messaging. Users receive messages inside and outside Clearspace when something inside changes or requires their attention.
Pricing should be around $30 per user per year for users connected to an internal server. I would expect Jive Software to start offering a hosted version, or sell that capability to someone else, to support distributed work teams across the Internet. Whether Clearspace will become the breakout collaboration tool remains to be seen, but Jive Software has rolled some good ideas into one slick application.
