Yammer vs Jive

Recently Terrasoft released mobile (iOS and Android) apps for its BPMonline CRM, and may be it remembered to Microsoft that the users of its CRM system also want to have a normal mobile access to customer data. Microsoft promised to release the mobile client for Microsoft Dynamics CRM back in May 2012, then at the end of the last year, then by February 2013. It's now March and Microsoft has really launched something. But it's not a full-fledged mobile app, but just a web interface for the iPad browser, which of course, can't work offline and has many limitations. When the normal mobile CRM app will appear? Microsoft promises "in the first half of this year."

At the  SharePoint Conference 2012 Microsoft revealed some new facts about the upcoming SharePoint 2013. But nothing specific has been announced - just few promises. The exact release date is also still unknown. Microsoft's corporate vice president of the Office Division Kris Koenigsbauer promises a launch during the first fiscal quarter of 2013, which falls between October 1, 2012 and December 31, 2012. Now about the Yammer. As expected, Microsoft will integrate this social intranet service (acquired in June) into SharePoint. The integration will be done via Yammer Web Parts and Yammer Open Graph. Got it? And soon (Microsoft says) SharePoint will become a system "powered by Yammer". Ok, let's look what is the real sense of integration between SharePoint and Yammer.

Of course, it wasn't a secret that Yammer (the service that invented social intranet) - is a successful startup. But no one could imagine how successful it is. Microsoft is buying Yammer for as much as $1.2 billion. Most likely, it's too big price, but Microsoft has to overpay in order to protect its flagship product - SharePoint. We have already noted that after the rapid start, SharePoint has stopped in development. And lately two threats for SharePoint have appeared. The first threat is called "DropBox for business" - the new class of tools that sync files between computers and mobile devices. And the second threat - are these solutions for building enterprise social networks (Chatter, Yammer, Socialcast, Jive, etc.). For the first threat Microsoft has an answer - SkyDrive, but the social component in SharePoint it very weak.

Leading social software vendors Yammer, Jive, NewsGator updated their products and showed us the latest trends, transforming the corporate social networks. Yammer has released the desktop AIR-client (Win and Mac), added the ability to post videos in microblog posts, reward colleagues with badges for completed tasks (we have already seen such gamification in Rypple and Producteev), and realized the integration with NetSuite, reminding the bunch Salesforce + Chatter. NewsGator in its new version of NewsGator Social Sites 2 focused on improving the Sharepoint video capabilities (recall, Newsgator Social Sites works on top of the Sharepoint). Like in Yammer, videos can now be easily inserted into microblog messages and besides they are added to the video gallery (something like YouTube for the Enterprise) where all the social capabilities can also be utilized - comments, rating, likes:

In the past few days, the hype around Salesforce Chatter overshadows all other Enterprise 2.0 news. And of course, the developers of Chatter's main rival - Yammer have taken the chance to get a share of public attention and reminded Salesforce boss about how all this stuff was started. It started 3 years ago, when at the startup contest Techcrunch50 Yammer team introduced the world's first enterprise microblogging tool. Marc Benioff was the judge there and he expressed his excitement about the new service. And now, 3 years later Salesforce has introduced the Yammer's twin - Chatter.com. However, Yammer developers say that during those 3 years they where busy adding new features and have built much more advanced functionality and market progress. Yammer's progress is really amazing, but now it will be hard for them to compete with FREE Chatter.

One of the innovative Enterprise 2.0 trends is applications for business networks. These applications integrate groupware in partner companies and enable collaboration between them. Remember Salesforce to Salesforce or Freshbooks Software as a Network. The pioneer in enterprise microblogging Yammer also decided to join this trend and added the ability to create private b2b communities or workspaces. In single online space the representatives of various companies - customers, vendors, freelancers, partners can collaborate. Each of them has own profile, so that participants can learn more about each other. Every users can view the list of his networks and the number of new messages in each of them.

If you would like to become the giant of collaboration market right now, you'll need to provide customers the tools for: social intranet, file sharing (ala Dropbox), task/project management, Email and video/web conferencing. Until now, Jive was arguably the best social intranet provider and somehow solved file sharing tasks via the close partnership with Box. However, it's time to move ahead and play catch up with Microsoft and Salesforce, that don't mind buying startups to close the gaps in their collaboration suites. Today Jive has announced about the acquisition of two very good startups - task management app Producteev and online meetings tool Meetings.io. Producteev has become popular due to its convenience and multiple platforms support. And Meetings.io works as a notepad for online meetings (very simple). To welcome the new staff, the guys from Jive created this very cute movie. It's another example of useful video for business.

Finally, the customer service sphere is gaining attention and attracting the leading enterprise vendors. Recently, Salesforce came up with SaaS helpdesk-app Desk.com and now the Social Software champion - Jive - is presenting its own helpdesk solution Jive Customer Service. And of course, it's social, i.e. the front-end of the system is a customer community where users can communicate not only with support agents, but also with other users. And due to the fact that users get answers from experienced customers or find them in the community, the load on the support tems is greatly reduced. In addition to the social component, Jive also partnered with Gamification champion Bunchball to implement game mechanics into the system. It provides different ratings and badges helping to engage customers into the community.

Leading social software vendors Yammer, Jive, NewsGator updated their products and showed us the latest trends, transforming the corporate social networks. Yammer has released the desktop AIR-client (Win and Mac), added the ability to post videos in microblog posts, reward colleagues with badges for completed tasks (we have already seen such gamification in Rypple and Producteev), and realized the integration with NetSuite, reminding the bunch Salesforce + Chatter. NewsGator in its new version of NewsGator Social Sites 2 focused on improving the Sharepoint video capabilities (recall, Newsgator Social Sites works on top of the Sharepoint). Like in Yammer, videos can now be easily inserted into microblog messages and besides they are added to the video gallery (something like YouTube for the Enterprise) where all the social capabilities can also be utilized - comments, rating, likes:

Jive is the champion on the enterprise social software market, and regarding the social functions (creating social connections, customer engagement, integrating the intranet with Facebook and Twitter) - it's the best of breed solution. But document collaboration tools in Jive leave much to be desired. Therefore, Jive is often used as a social layer in combination with Sharepoint or other collaboration solutions. But of course, Jive wants to fill this gap. Today Jive has acquired OffiSync - the document collaboration service. Recall, OffiSync - is a plugin + service, which allows almost real time collaboration on MS Office documents using Google Docs as the synchronization point. Recently, Google has released almost similar (and free) service Google Cloud Connect that could take OffiSync out of the market, so Jive's acquisition - is a great outlet for the start-up. Especially taking into account the price tag - $25-30 million.

Gartner has published the Magic Quadrant for enterprise Social Software market 2010. In the previous similar report in 2009 the MQ reminded the Brownian movement of molecules because of the large number of vendors and approaches to the enterprise social tools. That's why Gartner decided to clarify its approach. At first, they split the Social Software for internal and external. The external was defined as Social CRM - and moved to the separate report. And this Magic Quadrant is focused only on internal social tools, designed for collaboration within enterprise. Additionally in order to mute the noise, Gartner introduced several restrictions. First, each vendor should have at least 100,000 end users. Second, each product should include the following social tools:

At least since the previous year experts are talking about Social CRM, as of the most promising technology on the large CRM market. Now, these talks have the official confirmation - Gartner has published the Social CRM Magic Quadrant (as a rule, such reports are only created for the largest markets). According to the report, 80% of the CRM market growth in 2010 is due to the Social CRM development and the total investments in the social CRM in the next year will reach $1 billion. So what is social CRM? Gartner refers the following technologies to this concept: social Web monitoring, fetching contact information from social media, customer/partner community management, collecting feedback and ideas from customers. According to the report, Social CRM market leaders are Jive SBS and Lithium. Both solutions do not contain traditional CRM functionality, but rather, are designed for integration with traditional CRM. Salesforce, thanks to the release of Chatter, Ideas and acquiring Jigsaw, managed to get only into Visionaries section. Note the absence of startups in the Challengers section - it promises good opportunities for those who will decide to enter this market now.

Social Software adopts consumer web achievements (wikis, blogs, profiles, tags, ratings, social connections, people search, micro-blogging) in the enterprise environment. Of course, today almost all software vendors say that their software provides social computing, but in most cases it's only PR pitches and their software is not really social. At the same time there are few "native social software" solutions, that provide a social layer for company intranet and really enable it to achieve the social software objectives: create enterprise-wide community and improve collaboration. The most successful on this market are 3 solutions: Jive SBS, SocialText and NewsGator Social Sites.