for W3c validation

This year’s theme is ‘Powering Human Connection.’ Fittingly then, Jive CEO Elisa Steele invited Aurea CEO Scott Brighton on stage to meet and greet (and connect with) the audience during the opening keynote on day 1.

We’re sure most of you have heard that Jive have agreed to be acquired by Aurea. The deal is expected to close by early July. In the meantime, both organisations will be limited in the additional information that can be released while they follow appropriate processes with their shareholders and M&A requirements. However, they are committed to providing updates where possible as the deal moves forward.

What does it mean for Jive?

If you’ve never heard of Aurea, you’re not alone. They are a company focused on customer experience, with a portfolio of acquired software companies and leading customers such as British Airways and Disney. Scott Brighton told us that Aurea are buying Jive specifically to fill a gap in their portfolio – enabling collaboration and engagement that can power transformative customer experiences. Scott also told partners at the Summit on Monday that Aurea are committed to releasing their strategy and vision for Jive very soon after the deal closes. In addition, we’re advised that the expectation for the announcements made at JiveWorld17 regarding the Roadmap releases this year will go ahead as planned.

The language and energy from the Aurea leaders present at JiveWorld about the need for employees to be supported digitally to both collaborate and be engaged as a necessary foundation for any organisation to provide great customer experiences is very encouraging, and certainly aligns with the underlying premise of Jive’s current direction.

Jive’s Roadmap

Jive’s direction is towards providing exponential value through borderless communities. Their roadmap includes the move to AWS in mid-2017 and an impressive release in Q4 2017 (see below). In addition, they have some exciting plans for building on these foundation pieces in 2018 and beyond. We also expect to see the marketing distinction between Jive-n and Jive-x start to fade away as they move to configurable borderless communities, although Nick Hill, VP of Product Management, told me on twitter this marketing change will not take place in 2017.

2017.2 – coming Q4

The big product news from JiveWorld17 were the announcements regarding the 2017.2 release. Jive ID has been hinted at for a while, and we heard more about making that a reality at Jive. The release is planned for the end of the year (in quarter 4), and will power what Jive calls the “collaboration hub.”

Jive ID

Jive identity, or Jive ID, will allow users to hold one ID for all your Jive communities. So, for organisations that host multiple Jive instances for various purposes (e.g. employees, partners, customers), they will be able to have a unified admin and unified ID, allowing users to have their profile and account information follow them around these communities, while admins can bulk manage users and apply permissions at the community level to these users from one unified admin console.

Jive content ID

Jive’s content ID is all about bringing the metadata of content from other sources external to Jive into Jive, to truly bridge the gaps between systems and break down system fragmentation. The content will remain in the master source, however a rich preview and all relevant metadata from the source will be available within Jive, for collaboration and discussion.

Universal search

Content ID in turn powers universal search – the connectors that bring in content from anywhere, will also allow for indexing of content from anywhere. Once this content is indexed, it’s discoverable through search right from inside Jive. This means content that lives in another source will be accessible through Jive, without the user actually needing to go to that source system in order to view it or collaborate on it.

Jive WorkGraph

Jive WorkGraph is all about taking the data available and tying it together to improve context, relevancy and personalisation within Jive. Similar in concept to the Microsoft Office Graph, the use of Work Graph seeks to enhance the experience of using Jive, as well as enable discovery through surfacing contextually relevant content, people and conversations that users may never have otherwise known existed.

These are exciting developments from Jive, and both this platform and enterprise collaboration software are heading in a great direction with these types of initiatives. Jive are now visibly heading towards truly living up to the promise of being a “collaboration hub.”

Disclaimer: More detail is yet to come, and as we heard on stage at the product keynote, these are planned deliveries and should not be relied upon when making purchasing decisions.