Jive Buys OffiSync to Socialize Microsoft Office, SharePoint

Jive Software is ramping up its acquisition pace with the acquisition of OffiSync, a software-integration tool that lets users search and annotate documents.

Financial terms of the deal, which comes 6 weeks after Jive acquired big data company Proximal Labs, were not disclosed.

Jive and OffiSync together will interact with Microsoft Office and SharePoint software, both of which have been criticized for not being social enough at a time when social collaboration is headed toward becoming a $1 billion market.

Specifically, OffiSync integration with the Jive Social Business platform will let users create content in Word, PowerPoint, Excel and SharePoint, and share and annotate it without leaving their Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) environment to revise it.

OffiSync will let users push conversations into a social discussion on the Jive platform. Users can also view and reply to discussions on the Jive platform from their Microsoft Outlook inbox.

Jive and OffiSync will also help supplement the contact information in Microsoft Outlook with profiles and activities from Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Jive CEO Tony Zingale and OffiSync CEO Oudi Antebi discuss the deal in this video.

Thanks to an existing partnership with OffiSync, Jive integration with Microsoft Office is available immediately with Jive 4.5 and Jive 5. Integration with Microsoft Outlook will follow in the third quarter of this year.

The OffiSync team, most of whom are based in Tel Aviv, Israel, will join Jive but remain in their country thanks to a new R&D center Jive is building in Tel Aviv. The team in Israel will be led by OffiSync co-founder and CTO Roy Antebi, who will join Jive as vice president of engineering.

Roy’s brother, Oudi Antebi, will join Jive at its headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., as senior vice president of enterprise solutions, driving Jive’s “vision and strategy for integration with Microsoft and the broader enterprise stack.”

This makes sense. Oudi Antebi ran marketing campaigns for Microsoft Office and SharePoint, while Roy Antebi once shepherded a development team in the Microsoft SQL Server division.

For OffiSync, the move represents an interesting turn after the company positioned the technology as a way to access Google Apps, Google Docs and Google search from within any Microsoft Office or SharePoint application. Users could also save Office documents in Google Docs.

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) went on to buy DocVerse and create Google Cloud Connect, which lets users save their Word documents in Google Docs. This negated any need to work with or acquire OffiSync.

Jive, the most successful standalone social-business software maker with 15 million users, is expected to go public, if not this year, then in 2012. LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD) went public May 19, and its shares soared to over $122 at one point on the opening day of trading.