Jive

Jive is a collaboration and communication software as a service with a focus on internal social networks for corporations. It allows for human capital management and employees to engage in company wide news, and helps to foster relationships and facilitate team work. It's a great idea for HR to use as a portal for all their personalized communication and news updates. It's also a great place to share company photos and event information. You can create and follow groups so you are able to have your teams collaborate in real time in their groups. The Green team or Christmas party planning group, for example. You can post updates, share image and videos basically utilize a lot of social functionality similar to Facebook. This platform helps minimize liability regarding your employee base on public social networks. And helps foster healthy relationships for teams and is a way for colleagues across departments to stay connected after sharing a nice conversation at a company event, for example. I like the user interface quite a lot better than Yammer. Yammer is eerily close to Facebook and kind makes you feel like you would rather just be using it instead. Jive has a lot of useful functionality and relatively unique way to present it. There are a good amount of integrations available for Jive which is cool and really extends it's value in new ways. Including Gmail, Google Drive and Box though these are not available in all plans.

The tiered plans each have exclusive features and this business model is not as valuable in my opinion as a SAAS which offers inclusive value across their plans so that all of their customers are receiving optimal value which shows that the companies really does what their customers to succeed, in a tiered plan which includes better quality or more quantity of these features. Exclusive pricing models in my opinion are more in the best interest of the company and not it's customers which translates into significantly weaker word of mouth marketing. They have Pricing links so you expect to be able to view this information but it appears these pages are mostly to appease their prospects because beyond the $2 per user, per month it doesn't say anything about integration or onboarding. You're required to contact them for a custom quote which makes sense because the range of company wanting to use Jive can range greatly; my point is only please don't pretend you have anything close to transparent pricing available on a Pricing page when it's not the case. The $2 per user, per month could get very costly. And while this tool facilitates essential internal communication and collaboration it does not serve as a critical tool which affect your bottom line directly day to day. It's a secondary storage and communication tool at best costing $50,000 per month for a 25,000 employee company? Or $400,000 per month for a 200,000 employee company? Is this beside the integration or onboarding investment cost? I'm not certain how you justify this when you can create a free private LinkedIn group or private Facebook group with all of the same security and functionality hosted on world class infrastructure. Although I can appreciate keeping your internal communication branded and private, it just seems like a large investment for a non-sales tool.

I would poll your employees to learn whether it's a justifiable investment. Jive a competent SAAS with robust features but at what cost? Does it grow your revenue directly? Are you able to have your entire company adopt it in order to create a real online community your staff use as much or more than they already use Facebook? There are clearly situations when Jive would be a great fit but there are a lot particular details to understand and measure prior to investing in a private social network software with a large monthly price, in my opinion.