Jive Builds Social Software Bridges to Microsoft Office, Apple iPhone

Jive's cloud computing bridge approach to Microsoft's on-premises Office suite prompted Hersh to claim that Jive is essentially turning Microsoft Office into Google Docs.

"It's really taking down the wall between social business software and Microsoft Office, which is a huge deal for a lot of our customers," he said. "So many Office users live with Microsoft Office, and they need a way to elegantly combine the two so they're sharing documents they're creating the right way."

Jive isn't the first to build bridges between Google's cloud and Microsoft's download-to-desktop client software. Google itself launched a syncing API this year, while startups such as Offisync also have entered this race.

Speaking of bridging, Jive also fortified its Jive Bridging module. Marketing and sales teams can now go out to public Jive communities and pull conversations about customer issues or channel partner needs back into their private Jive community for internal discussion behind the firewall. They can then push their organized responses back out to the Web.

This all happens securely with a few mouse clicks, and is an important step at a time when corporate employees are struggling to respond to dialogues in online communities from behind their enterprise firewalls. This is Jive's social CRM play, a nod to offerings from Oracle, Salesforce.com and RightNow.

Jive has also joined the race for enterprise social software on mobile devices, offering Jive Mobile modules to bring the Jive SBS 4.0 capabilities on the iPhone and BlackBerry. Jive Mobile includes a native application for the iPhone and better e-mail integration for the BlackBerry and other e-mail-enabled mobile devices.  

Hersh said Jive Mobile users will be able to do anything they can do from SBS 4.0, including search profiles and participate on blogs, threads and online communities, from their iPhone or iPod Touch gadgets.

Though this is similar to functionality Socialtext is already enabling for its wiki platform, Jive is right to address the needs of its corporate road warrior customers, who need to collaborate with colleagues and partners on the go.     

Jive offers SBS 4.0 in a few pricing buckets. For internal use, SBS 4.0 costs $59 per user per year, or $15,000 if Jive hosts it. The public offering is $85,000 per year for up to 250,000 page views per month. Jive Mobile for the iPhone is $10,000 per year for the first 1,000 users.