The range of internal social media platforms is currently huge and the overview is far to be found. Moreover, it is impossible to single out one platform as the best. Whether a platform meets the requirements depends heavily on the goals and wishes of the organization. This means that the outcome is never determined in advance when we are asked to select platforms for organizations.
So we can’t tell you in this blog which platform is the best. What we can do is give more insight into what can be found. This time we focus on the big but still relatively unknown Jive in the Netherlands.
About Jive
We recently came into contact with Jive through one of our customers. Jive is a big name in the field of social business internationally, with clients such as T-Mobile America, HP, Thomson Reuters, Starbucks and Volkswagen. This is not limited to internal social issues. For example, T-Mobile has an external community for sharing knowledge and solutions with and by customers that runs on Jive.
Despite the fact that Jive is a big name, we hear it very little in our country. In our internal social media benchmark, none of the participants indicated that they were using Jive. If it’s up to Jive, that will soon change: the company has also had an office in the Netherlands since last year. Therefore, this is a good time to take a closer look at the platform. We spoke with Pieter Berendsen, sales manager at Jive, and had a good look under the hood.
Jive initially resembles well-known microblogging tools such as Yammer. The platform therefore has all the functions that you would expect from such a platform, such as uploading documents and photos, writing short messages, tagging colleagues. but Jive is much more than that, it is a complete social intranet with many integration options. The latter is a point where Jive stands out strongly from most other platforms.
Operation
Jive does not want to replace the functions of existing systems or simply coexist with other systems, but is the social layer over the tools that are already used in your organization. Many standard integration options are available for this with systems such as SAP, SharePoint, Cisco, Outlook, Evernote and Office. For example, if you use Word to create documents, you will continue to write your text documents with it. Next to your Word document, you’ll see a Jive screen where you can collaborate with colleagues on and discuss that specific document. This will accelerate the adoption curve.
Jive is built around three pillars: people, content and places. People means profiles, which can partly be filled automatically by linking with internal systems or with LinkedIn. Just like on LinkedIn, you can also write recommendations for your colleagues. finding people with the right knowledge – a challenge for many organizations – can be improved.
You can create content within Jive itself: you can upload documents to and edit them in the platform or add them via a link with your existing document management system such as SharePoint.
Places is how the content and people are organized. These come in three flavors: sites that are directly related to a particular department (such as a site for HR), groups for more ad hoc collaboration across departmental boundaries (in which external parties can also be invited) and project sites with various project management tools.
Distinctive features
The very extensive integration possibilities with other systems are distinctive compared to most other internal social platforms. In addition, the tooling for measuring and monitoring the social intranet stands out. This component is often forgotten or is very limited on many platforms. This is when you always want to be able to measure the extent to which your internal platform contributes to achieving your goals. After all, if you don’t know that, you don’t know what to send.
For example, Jive provides insight into what kind of content is created, but also what the impact of that content is. How much has an article been read, liked, shared, commented on and with what sentiment? Furthermore, Jive can tell you how many people are active on your platform and which departments are ahead with the use of Jive and which are lagging behind. This tooling has an extra price tag.
Packages and costs
Jive is offered in various ways. You get the most freedom when you host it internally or opt for a private cloud solution. In this way, you can tinker, for example, with the appearance and operation of the platform. With a public cloud version, you get the product in the standard form, with more limited customization options.
Jive is certainly not the cheapest social platform you can find. The cheapest package, Essentials, costs twelve dollars per user per month. However, if you actually want to integrate with existing systems, for example with Outlook or Office, You Need Essentials+ for eighteen dollars per user. To integrate with Sharepoint and Lync, you need the Enterprise version, the price of which is not fixed.
Additional features, such as the Comprehensive Analysis tool and gamification support, are at an additional cost for all packages beschikbaar.
In short
Jive is a social intranet that may not leave a good impression on you at first glance, because out-of-the-box, in our opinion, is not a very nice platform. In addition, it is pricey if you compare it with internal social platforms like Yammer. Don’t let that be a reason not to see Jive as a serious candidate, because the second impression can surprise you. Jive has a feature package that is significantly more extensive than that of most other platforms. In particular, the integration possibilities with other systems stand out in a positive way, as does the analysis tool.
We also took a look under the hoods of Iris Intranet, Viadesk, A&M impact, Valo Intranet and Speakap.
