This review has been long overdue on me .. it’s been hard to sneak out time to complete this but I’m glad that I’ve finally been able to complete this blog. In addition I've also created a PDF version of the review that I'll be updating for time to time.
Overview
With the increased global adoption of the Internet and Social Networking, the enterprises have started realizing the potential of communities. At the same time, the 2008 – 2009 eco
nomic slump has pushed the enterprises to look at alternate & cost effective means of their Brand Marketing - acquire & retain customers. As a result we have seen an increase enterprise focus on Social Networking and adoption of Communities as part of their Enterprise 2.0 strategy.
nomic slump has pushed the enterprises to look at alternate & cost effective means of their Brand Marketing - acquire & retain customers. As a result we have seen an increase enterprise focus on Social Networking and adoption of Communities as part of their Enterprise 2.0 strategy. Jive Software has been one of the leading vendors in the Communities / Social Business space. Jive Software was named as Visionary Gartner in the 2008 Magic Quadrant for Social 
Software; in 2009 it moved the Leader rating the Magic Quadrant. Jive was also named at a Leader along with Telligent by Forrester in its Forrester Wave for Community Platforms, Q1 2009.
Software; in 2009 it moved the Leader rating the Magic Quadrant. Jive was also named at a Leader along with Telligent by Forrester in its Forrester Wave for Community Platforms, Q1 2009. Jive Software was founded by Bill Lynch (now CTO of Jive Software) and Matt Tucker (now Vice President – Product Management) in April 2001, primarily as a vendor for Instant Messaging (Openfire) and Forum (Jive Forums) software. Of these Openfire (previously known as Wildfire and Jive Messenger) is now an Open Source Project while Forums have evolved and incorporated into the Jive SBS / Clearspace.
Clearspace was first launched in February 2007 as one of the first fully integrated social suites addressing the needs of employee communities. Clearspace Community was launched in May 2007 focused on Customer & Partner communities outside of the firewall. Clearspace 2.0 was then released in April 2008, followed by version 2.5 in August 2008. With the release of Version 3.0 in March 2009, Jive renames the product to Jive SBS (Social Business Software). This was followed by Jive SBS 4.0 release in October 2009.
Architecture
Functional Perspective
The Jive Community architecture is primarily built around Spaces – it constitutes components that facilitate collaboration like blogs, discussions, project, spaces itself (called sub-spaces) etc and Content – that’s generated through collaboration in these spaces like documents, rich media, and other forms of user generated content.
Technical Perspective
The following diagram gives an overview of the building blocks, the nuts & bolts that constitutes the Jive SBS architecture. 
Jive SBS is a J2EE based solution and leverages Struts 2.0 - the open framework for supporting the model-view-controller (MVC) architecture. In addition, SBS supports Spring Framework that was introduced in Clearspace release 2.0. Some of the key features it brought about were dependency injection service & robust configuration - features that were initially managed by JiveContext. The Spring components used by SBS are:
· Spring Core - dependency injection container that’s being using for lifecycle and dependency management of back-end: DAOs, managers and actions.
· Spring JDBC - for DAO operations
· Spring AOP - for dependency injection or inversion of control (IoC) and enabling transactions.
· Spring Transactions – for transaction & improved data integrity
· Spring Security – authorization & Authentication mechanism (formerly known as Acegi).
· Spring LDAP – for LDAP access.
Jive SBS leverages Open Symphony's OSWorkflow architecture for workflow implementation – it allows creation an end to end workflow process by just changing the XML configuration. You can use plugins to create customized workflows deploy at runtime without having to redeploy the core SBS application.
For AJAX support Jive uses DWR - an RPC library which makes it easy to call Java functions from JavaScript and to call JavaScript functions from Java (a.k.a Reverse Ajax)
For web services support, jive uses Apache CXF an open source framework that enables Jive to expose its functionality via SOAP as well as REST web services
For content search within the community, Jive uses Apache Lucene search engine – leading open source search tool. While for searching content outside the community, it uses OpenSearch.
For the distributed cache & clustering, Jive leverages Oracle Coherence (erstwhile Tangosol Coherence) which allows application state to be shared among all the cluster members in a clustered deployment. This enables administrators to move servers in & out of the cluster at will; and also ensuring that any cluster node failures are transparent to the end users. Coherence uses multicast (default & recommendation approach) to communicate between clustered nodes. If more than one network interface is present on the server, Coherence picks one of the interfaces (probably eth0) to send out multicast packets from. You can however also configure it to use Network interfaces & port.
Spaces – Jive’s Foundation
A Space Or Community comprises of one or more spaces – a space provide a platform for collaboration between community users having similar interests or organizational department. Broadly a space can contain documents, discussions, blogs, projects, videos & of course sub-spaces. In addition, a space can also contain polls, tags, and announcements.
The administrator can create and configure spaces and setup defaults in addition to user permissions, assign space administrators and content moderators. You can select one or more moderators for a space, both at the root space level as the sub-space level; you can also select the content that these moderators can moderate.
Widgets & Personalization
Jive support widgets which gives administrators the flexibility to customize the layout and structure of the following pages in Jive the installation.
1. Your View (default) – Default home page for users that can be customized by the administrator.
2. Space overview – overview page for the specific space
3. Project Overview - overview page for the specific project
4. Group Overview - overview page for the specific group
The administrator can use the drag & drop interface for customizing this page by selecting the desired layout and widgets for these layouts. Jive provides a collection of widgets out of box (my test machines has 49 out of box widgets); you can further extend this by developing custom widgets.
Also as an end user, you can have the flexibility to personalize default view of the community “Your View” or “Your Home Page” or “Overview” - layout as well as the widgets.
While the changes made by the administrator are visible & default setting for all the users, the changes made by users are specific only to the individual users
PS: These widgets however can’t be directly exposed outside of Jive for now.
Administration
Installation
Jive SBS 4.0 doesn’t support Windows platform and I didn’t have a Linux Platform handy, so I’ve not really been able to perform a complete installation of SBS 4. However my previous experience with Clearspace 2.x installation wasn’t really troublesome –just a few simple clicks and had Jive up and running. So I’m guess this ease of installation would have been maintained if not improved on.
The Jive SBS package can be configured to fine-tune various settings such as shared memory and maximum file handles etc, using the jive-system script stored in /etc/init.d. Jive SBS installation by default is managed by a local system user named jive belonging to the jive group and home directory /usr/local/jive.
Administrator Console
Jive provides quite an elaborate Admin 
Console to enable administrators manage the SBS instance - system settings, communities, users & groups, permissions and content like documents, forums, blogs, wikis, blogs, etc.
Console to enable administrators manage the SBS instance - system settings, communities, users & groups, permissions and content like documents, forums, blogs, wikis, blogs, etc. Jive also supports role based administration and content moderation that facilitates distributed administration of large communities. The following table gives a high level overview of the tasks that can be managed by various administrative roles.
| Task | System Admin | Space Admin | User/Group Admin |
| Manage Spaces | ü | ü | |
| Manage Permissions | ü | ü | |
| Manage Users and Groups | ü | ü | |
| LDAP and Active Directory setup | ü | ||
| Performance Fine-Tuning | ü | ||
| Clustering | ü | ||
| Customizing UI the Basic Way | ü | ü | |
| Customizing UI with the Theme Resource Kit | ü | ü | |
| Advanced Theming | ü | ||
| Upgrade and Migration | ü | ||
| Setting up Community Everywhere | ü | ||
| Localizing Jive SBS | ü |
Language Support
Jive supports a broad range of languages via uses of resource bundles for all text on default skin. Jive also supports multi-lingual search and separate language analyzers – it gives you the ability to select the language of your choice while performing your search.
User Profile
A Jive administrator can customise the user profile properties as well as define what properties are visible to other users to ensure member privacy. 
In addition Jive also allows users to collaborate and connect with other uses within the community.
In addition Jive also allows users to collaborate and connect with other uses within the community. Reporting & Analytics
The Reporting / Analytics module of jive records nearly every event that occurs in the SBS implementation - pages/documents/discussion viewed by users, attachments downloaded, number of pages viewed per visit, avg time spent on Jive, etc. This helps the administrator to understand user behaviour & interactions patterns in the community; derive meaningful conclusions / trends, create detailed queries etc.
Release 4.0 also includes support for connecting Jive SBS Analytics data warehouse to the SAP Business Objects suite for creating flexible, high powered business reporting solutions. The Insights module monitors the site's content for emerging keywords, and measures the popularity of those topics as well as the users' mood towards them.
Integration & Extensibility
Modules
Apart from the support for custom developed widgets discussed above Jive provides out-of-box modules that can help dramatically enhance the platform value for the business. By putting together the right combination of these modules, you can extend the platform to tailor-made solutions to foster Marketing & Sales initiative, Employee collaboration, Team Innovation, Customer Support etc.
Analytics Module
With this module, you get an enterprise-class reporting and analytics solution built on the SAP® BusinessObjects™ BI OnDemand solution, which features extensive dashboards, intuitive reporting, and ad hoc investigation tools. Community managers can quickly quantify and characterize the growth and success of their communities. Business users can capture detail around individual behaviors, content, and interactions to develop a clear picture of community dynamics.
Bridging Module
This unique featured module bridges employee (intranet) as well as public (internet) communities and facilitates seamless interaction. You can pull high-impact content from the public conversation inside for team discussion and collaboration, and just easily respond to customers by posting all or part of the discussion back to the public community.
Community Discovery Module
This social media analytics module has been a recent addition to the Jive portfolio as a result of the Filtrbox acquisition. The module analyzes the user-generated content for customer sentiment & mood; response to new marketing campaign; brand perception etc. The module presents neat dashboard that helps you analyze the online conversations as well as quickly drill down into specific discussion.
Jive Ideation Module
Connect people, ideas and information across the board without barriers. Jive Ideation expands how you currently innovate with SBS to include idea creation, voting, ranking, highlighting and filtering capabilities and much more. This is your axe for breaking down the barriers preventing your company from capturing, organizing and prioritizing ideas. Channel the voices of your market and partners, score their ideas, and then pick off the best ones to drive your business forward.
Jive Video Module
This module streamlines the management of video libraries and makes it easy to moderate, tag and publish video assets. Users get an intuitive interface for viewing videos as well as the ability to rate, comment and bookmark them.
Jive Mobile Module
This module delivers an enriched experience for JBS users using iPhone, BlackBerry and other smart phones - enables employees to collaborate even when they are away from their desks.
Microsoft SharePoint Module
This connectors bi-directional content movement & bring the best of the both the worlds together - complex workflow and content management capabilities from SharePoint; collaboration and social networking capabilities from Jive SBS.
Microsoft Office
This module lets you view and comment on Office documents from Jive without having to download and open them. With this module, not only can you view and comment on MS Office documents from Jive without having to download and open them, the comments are also synchronized with your MS Office applications for a unified view. Now you don't have to leave Jive SBS to work in Microsoft Office, or leave Office to work in Jive SBS. This module fully integrates the two environments, but it delivers groundbreaking extensions of Office capabilities, including powerful simultaneous co-authoring and automatic file synchronization
Themes
Themes provided the means to change the look & feel of Jive subsystem without any impact to the functionality – they enable separation of the presentation layer from the functional layer. A Theme is a combination of FreeMarker template, CSS and images which can be developed to manage the user experience of the Jive implementation. Once developed and deployed on the servers, the administrator can apply the new Theme by just a click of a button.
Jive themes allow for the presentation control based on the following scope definitions.
· Global – a theme can be applied to Global scope to cover the look & feel of the complete Jive implementation.
· Community – a theme can then be used to control the look & feel of a specific community. You can have multiple such themes to address each community separately.
· URL – the scope of the Theme can be mode more specific by mapping it to specific URLs only.
Do keep in mind that the granular theme (lower in scope hierarchy) take higher precedence & overrides its predecessor - the URL Theme will override Community & Global themes.
Search
Jive provides search access to content it contains within the SBS instance (including information about people) as well as access to external search engines that support OpenSearch. For internal search, Jive uses Apache Lucene search engine – the leading OpenSource search tool. It supports search federation; multi-lingual search capabilities; dynamic search across places, people and content.
If your users want to search for content search outside the community, Jive can integrate with external search engines that support OpenSearch.
Security
Authentication
SBS provides an out of box support for authentication which would suffice for typical stand alone implementations. For large scale enterprise wide implementations, it supports LDAP & AD integration. Version 4.0 introduced Delegated Authentication - a mechanism that allows user definition outside of the Jive SBS system. Thus whenever a user attempts to login, SBS will make a simple web service call to the configured server for authentication.
Authorization
SBS Authorization framework is designed around Permission Area, Permission Levels (Access Rules), User Groups and User overrides.
Permission Areas represent a mix of roles, places, and content types like Administrative, Space, Blog, Home Page, Social Group, Private Message & Mobile; Permission Level is a collection granular permissions defined for each these Permission Areas like Full Access, Mange System, Moderate Content, Mange Users, Contribute etc. Jive provides default permission levels bundles for Administrative and Space areas; while the bundles for the Administrative levels can’t be customized, ones for Spaces can be.
You can create Users Groups as needed and assign Permission Area & Levels to these User Groups; you can further define overrides for users by granting them specific permission. Jive also allows creation of custom permissions levels to meet your requirements.
Single Sign On (SSO)
Integrating SSO with Jive enables users to login once and access enterprise web site as well as Jive communities. Jive SBS does not out of the box SSO support, however this integration can be achieved by using the Auth Token and Auth Factory libraries. You can also leverage the sample SSO plugin as the starting point to build a custom plugin for SSO implementation.
Performance & Scalability
While performance is a relative term and it depends of a number of parameter, Jive support most of industry standard features required to ensure optimal performance of your deployment.
Jive provides support for distributed Caching as well as Clustering powered by Oracle Coherence. The clustering module allows SBS to run on multiple application servers simultaneously & enables sharing of application state across the cluster members, thus providing increased speed and fault-tolerance - servers can be added / removed from the cluster at will, and any node failures are transparent to the end users. A typical clustered Jive implementation would consist of:
· A Session aware load balancer that receives user request, inspects the cookie value and sends a given user's requests to the same application server during a given session. Without session-aware load balancing, the load-balancer could send requests to any application server in the cluster.
· A customized version of Apache Foundation’s Apache HTTPD web server that communicates with the backed Apache Tomcat application server using the JK protocol
· The tomcat server is where the Jive Application bundle is installed – thus handling the business logic and the HTTP request coming through the web server. You can have the web server and application server running on the same physical box
· And finally the DB server to manage the data (ref to Summary section for list of databases supported)
Other means of improving performance include
· Client Side Caching: enables caching of static production content like images, style sheets, etc (HTTPD server default configuration can be vied at /usr/local/jive/etc/httpd/conf.d/cache.conf)
· Server Side Caching: enable caching of pages that are assembled dynamically from data and resources to be presented to anonymous uses only.
· External Caching: Apart from the internal system caching, Jive also support easy integration with CDN (Content Delivery Network) – this offloading the static content off your Web Sever to CDN’s can improve end user performance by 20% or more, especially when you have a geographically distributed user base.
Hardware Requirements
Following are the minimum hardware recommended by Jive.
| CPUs | Two physical multi-core chips recommended, 2 GHz minimum. |
| Memory | 3-4 GB physical RAM |
| More Information | For more recommendations about the network, storage, or scalability options, refer to the full system requirements page in the documentation. |
Configuration Recommendations
Internal Deployments
For internal deployments, expect a higher ratio of actions that write to the database. This includes creating new content, adding comments and replies, updating content, and so on. Here, writes are estimated as 15 percent of the number of page views.
| Page Views / Month | Database Writes /Month | CPUs (at least 2 GHz) | RAM | Location of App Server and Database | Clustered? |
| 500,000 | 75,000 | 1 dual core CPU | 3GB, 2GB Java heap | Share a box | No |
| 1,000,000 | 150,000 | 1 dual core CPU | 3GB, 2GB Java heap | Separate boxes | No |
| 5,000,000 | 750,000 | 1 dual core CPU | 4GB, 2GB Java heap | Separate boxes | Yes |
| 10,000,000 | 1,500,000 | 1 dual core CPUs | 4GB, 2GB Java heap | Separate boxes | Yes |
| 25,000,000 | 3,750,000 | 2 dual core CPUs | 4GB, 2GB Java heap | Separate boxes. Database box is a quad core. | Yes |
External Deployments
In general, an external deployment is going to have a very high ratio of page views relative to database writes. That's because external deployments tend to support communities with a large number of people who rarely contribute but often check back to read what others are posting.
| Page Views per Month | Content Created per Month | CPUs (at least 2 GHz) | RAM | Location of App Server and Database | Clustered? |
| 500,000 | 20,000 | 1 dual core CPU | 3GB, 2GB Java heap | Share a box | No |
| 1,000,000 | 20,000 | 1 dual core CPU | 3GB, 2GB Java heap | Separate boxes | No |
| 5,000,000 | 50,000 | 1 dual core CPU | 4GB, 2GB Java heap | Separate boxes | Yes |
| 10,000,000 | 50,000 | 1 dual core CPUs | 4GB, 2GB Java heap | Separate boxes | Yes |
| 25,000,000 | 100,000 | 2 dual core CPUs | 4GB, 2GB Java heap | Separate boxes/DB box is a quad core | Yes |
Other Features
Most enterprises have a very diverse user base, some who are more conversant than others with web 2.0 features like wikis, blogs, discussion forums, social networking, etc. Jive provides a highly intuitive interface that helps enterprises overcome these challenges enabling easier adoption with users – one of the key reasons for the larger success of the product. Apart from these Jive provides an array of features like:
· Discussions: Start a topic, or comment on one. Ask a question, then mark it as answered.
· Documents: Create collaborative documents, or upload any file type, such as PDF or MS Office.
· Dashboard: Configure your homepage for at-a-glance updates.
· Bookmarks: See what’s popular and keep track of favourites.
· Polls: Take the temperature on a topic.
· Tags: Users categorize content in their own terms.
· Preview Documents: Preview Microsoft Office documents and make in-line comments without downloading the files.
· Categories: Provide your users with common categories to choose from to control how content is organized.
· Connections: Stay in the know by following a team member’s activity.
· Projects: Shared task creation and timelines.
· Status: Share what’s going on at the moment.
· Discussions : Threaded as well as Flat discussions
· Help for newbies: A New User Wizard and a Tips & Tricks Widget helps get new members comfortable faster.
· Private Storage: Now you have private discussions & documents apart from groups or spaces.
o Your Documents: provides you with a private space “Your Documents” where you can save your documents to and determine who can see or edit these.
o Private Discussions: securely invite people to discuss a topic privately without having to associate it with a group or place.
· Enhanced Dashboard Configuration: you can auto-preview the widget content before you adding it to your dashboard.
· Rich Document Previews: preview and comment on any Word, PowerPoint, or PDF without downloading them.
· New User Wizard: New avatar creation makes it simple for a new user to create an avatar from their uploaded profile picture or select an avatar from a supplied gallery. In addition, the default dashboard layout for new users come pre-configured with a new widgets including the tips and tricks widget to help users become comfortable with working inside SBS.
· Enhanced Activity Stream: Recent activity now includes image previews, user avatars, content statistics and content snapshots. This improved presentation not only provides more context for the activities of the people you’re connected to but also speeds the discovery and discernment of content.
Licensing
In addition to the regular licensing model, Jive also offers a hosted (SaaS) model.
Company
Jive Software is the largest & the fastest growing Social Business Software Company with over 2,500 customers – including 15% of the Fortune 500 companies and office in 5 countries
Summary & Specifications
| OS |
|
| Database |
|
| Application Server |
|
| Licensing Models |
|
| Supported Browser |
|
| User Directory |
|
| Browser |
|
| Strengths |
|
| Weaknesses |
|
| Protocols |
|
| Library Versions |
|
