Why We Chose Clearspace

Sooner or later, you're going to have to chose a platform to get started.  Like any big decision that you can't easily revisit, there are a lot of forces pulling you in different directions.

For our purpose, we chose Clearspace by Jive Software. 

I thought I'd share with you our thinking, why we chose them, and our experiences so far.

Our Requirement

As I mentioned before, the first phase we'd like to tackle is behind-the-firewall proficiency here at EMC.  The thinking is that we get good at the skills and behaviors needed for social media proficiency (blogging, communities, tagging, etc.) and then venture outside the firewall once we have thousands of people who are comfortable in this world, and hundreds of vibrant communities.

So we needed a simple, integrated platform that did the basics -- nothing more.  Blogs, wikis and forums.  The ability to create subspaces.  The ability to freely tag.  A reasonably lightweight admin and management model.

We wanted something that was just about transparent as possible, so we could focus on using the tool, rather than the tool itself.

Initial Thinking

One school of thought was simply to extend the Microsoft environment we already had: use SharePoint and all the related technologies to build what we needed.  That option was quickly eliminated for two reasons: we'd need to upgrade vast amounts of EMC's infrastructure (servers AND desktops), and it wouldnt give us a slick mobile option, which we wanted. 

If we started today, we'd having something in 2009.

Another school of thought was to simply go hosted: find something nice and build it outside the firewall.  Didn't like that one as well.  We wanted to be able to look mgmt straight in the eye and say "the platform is safe".  I also wanted our IT guys to engage as well -- hosting makes it a bit too easy for them.

And then there was the legacy that came in two buckets: a bunch of bootleg projects around EMC that had done one thing or another, and another bucket was a candidate technology EMC develops and sells: eRoom.

All of the bootleg projects were built around "what was easy" as opposed to "what was right".  The fact that something was cheap or free (think open source) was their prime motivator.  We wanted a commercial product that had a vendor behind it. 

The internal EMC technology was nice, but focused on a significantly different task: document collaboration.  Now, collaborating around documents (versions, workflow, etc.) is important as well, but we wanted to focus more on the social part of social meda: discussions, blogs, etc.  So, we took some political risk and decided we wouldn't eat our own dog food this time.

Managing The Emotional Debate

I think it's fair to point out that this ended up being a fairly emotional discussion.  Two things helped to mitigate it.

One was that we set up a disposable SM site using DNN (dot net nuke) bootleg fashion, where we built a discussion forum to hammer out the strategy and the choices.  Maybe people didn't like what we were doing, but they joined the discussion, and at least felt their voices were heard.

Another was a purely logical argument that served to refocus the discussion.

I'm a big fan of analogies -- they're intellectual shortcuts to the right answer.  So my analogy was email.

Look, I said, let's say we were trying to decide on the best email package.  Now, if you're like most people, you are comfortable with all sorts of different email tools.  You probably use several.

You know how to find the basics: compose, send, etc.  Take a few minutes, and you can figure it out.

Why shouldn't our choice of social media platform be any different?  The real goal is to teach people how to use the tool, and not the tool itself.  It's like arguing the differences between Hotmail and Google Mail.  Yes, there are differences, but they're not significant in what we're trying to do here.

That sort of argument quieted people down a bit.

Tradeoffs

We found discussion forum packages that had a bit of support for blogging and wikis.  We found wiki packages that had a bit of support for forums and blogging.  And, of course, blogging packages that did a bit of discussion and wiki.

We felt that only Clearspace had a reasonable handle on all three.  Maybe not the best at any one, but decent enough (and consistent enough!) that our users could do all three with one package, and not really think too much about anything.

We found great toolsets that would allow you to build anything.  We weren't in a building mood; we wanted to set something up and get going.  Out-of-the-box functionality was key to us, the sooner the better.

Evaluation

Of course, everyone wants to get in on the evaluation, right?  Jive presented us an interesting option that I wanted to share.

Jive's site lets you do two cool things.  One thing is to get on their sandbox, register as a user, and fool around a bit: create docs, leave messages, etc.  Great way to evaluate the user experience.  You can go back whenever you have a few moments, and poke around.

Although that helps you understand the user experience, it doesn't give you a flavor for the community builder or administrator experience.

So Jive will let you do a quick registration, and download a fully-featured version of their product (up to 5 users) that runs self-contained on your desktop PC.  Cool.

So, after we were into the process a bit, we all downloaded the full version of Clearspace onto our laptops, and got to play with *all* the knobs and buttons.

Creating and deleting users.  Setting up spaces, privileges, behaviors.  Running reports.  Etc. etc.

I remember our catch-up concall after some of us had done this over the weekend.  We all had a pretty good grip on what we were looking at, and still had a few questions, but they were very specific and focused.

Nothing like a hands-on experience to get you comfortable with something.

Other Factors

One of the deciding factors for me was the online support forums.  They were active and had good participation.  That's nice.

I really liked the simplicity of the design and architecture.  I have a (dated) background in software design, and I really liked the elegance and simplicity of the model.

Jive has an unusual release policy: new releases show up every 3 to 4 weeks, and there's usually something good in every one of them: bug fixes and new features.  Between the time we started looking and when we're going to production, we looked at 1.3, 1.4, 1.5 and 1.6 -- and before too long, we'll see 1.7

That presents an interesting opportunity: I like the fact that I can stay current with Jive, and I don't have to wait six months for the next release.  But at the same time, most IT guys aren't set up to roll releases once a month.  We're going to spend a bit more on a test server just so we can keep up with their release train.

Clearspace uses an open-source-like model.  All the code is there, it's freely extensible and modifiable.  Again, we didn't want to get too clever here, but having the option is nice.

Jive also offers a hosted model.  That's attractive down the road if we decide to go outside the firewall.

A Few Drawbacks

We're a big enterprise.  Most of Jive's experience seems to have been with smaller projects and companies.  They'll get better, I'm sure.

One of the ways this manifested itself was with LDAP and SSO integration.  Every large company has a byzantine process for authorizing users, frequently with a technology called LDAP.  Going a bit further, we wanted to provide a seamless experience (single sign on, or SSO) that meant our users wouldn't have to login in again when working in Clearspace. 

EMC and Jive underestimated the time and effort required to do the integration.  As I write this, our IT guys have spent the last week trying to get stuff to work.  Someone from Jive is showing up onsite this morning to help us.

Not only has it been frustrating to everyone, but it's pushed us back a whole week on the project, maybe more.  It's messy, messy stuff.

As far as the rest of the environment, it's in pretty good shape.  We found a few nits, most of which were either config errors on our part, or known bugs fixed in the most recent release, or targeted for the next one.

Best of all, we all like the platform.  It's fun to use, and gives you great results without a lot of work.

The Clearspace Text Editor

Fair warning, if you're a stickler for document layout (especially fonts and whitespace), the Clearspace editor with drive you stark, raving bonkers.

It has this nasty habit of being unpredictable with white space, like you'd have between paragraphs.  After fussing with it for a few hours, I finally was reduced to pressing the "publish" button over and over again on the same document (without editing it), and each time I published, I saw a different treatment of white space in the document.

Now, it's OK for quick notes and short wikis, but for anything more serious, I was forced to use a combination of WordPad (for composition), wiki markup plain text (to ensure spacing, headers and format was right), followed by a VERY light pass with their rich text editor to add hyperlinks.

I hope they fix the damn thing, and soon.

Performance and Scale

One of the members of our group is extremely concerned with scalability and performance.  I didn't see anything to be concerned about, and here's why.

First, even if you're a "heavy" user of the system, you're not putting much of a load on the server, network or storage.  You're browsing, or doing a bit of light editing.

Second, the Clearspace architecture is the classic app server / database server arrangement.  Add more app servers if you need them.  Put a honkin' 10g Oracle instance behind them if you need to.  And, of course, being EMC, we had wicked fast storage arrays at our disposal.

I can see us running into config limitations and table overflows with Clearspace down the road as we scale.  But I can't see us running out of juice.  There's enough potential horsepower in the architecture to support 100,000 active users, maybe more.

Part of my day job is that I get involved with large IT architectures at big companies.  Trust me, for this type of application, there are all sorts of options to make it run really big and really fast.

Security

We finessed this concern by stating at the outset that (a) we'd be behind the firewall, and (b) there would be no private spaces.  Took most of the concern off the table, it did.

Summary

We're pleased with our choice.  We like the product, and we like the company.  The financial terms were very flexible, but -- then again -- we're a honkin' big company.

Other than the LDAP fiasco (which is just plain hard), Jive has been pretty responsive about our bugs and nits.  The stuff is pretty stable, and seems to be behaving well so far.

I like the Jive release train.  As we get more sophisticated with our requirements, I'm sure the Jive folks will be keeping track with us.

So, everyone's situation is different, but hopefully you've found a few nuggets here ...

Comments

[Jim D.]

Chuck,

We're piloting Clearspace ourselves, and I found your comments to be very enlightening. I'd love to be able to discuss this subject in more detail with you in more detail, if you're open to the idea. Thanks,

Jim

[Chuck Hollis]

If you're comfortable doing it here, that's fine.

Otherwise, let me know, and I'll drop you an email.

[Jim D.]

If you don't mind emailing me, I'd ideally like to set up a phone conversation to ask a few questions.

Thanks very much.

[Pat B.]

Chuck,

We have been looking at Confluence over the past few weeks and recently decided to abandon that for a number of reasons.

I am curious if you also looked at Confluence, and what your assessment is of that tool relative to Clearspace.

Thank you.

[Chuck Hollis]

Hi Pat

We too looked at Confluence early on, and abandoned it early on.

You've said nothing about your situation, goals, requirements, etc. so I'll have to go with my own take on those things.

We wanted an integrated tool: blogs, wikis, forums. We didn't see that so well with Confluence.

We wanted a user and administrative experience that was pretty much transparent to our users. We saw that in Clearspace.

We wanted a company that had a track record in larger scale social media applications. Jive had that with Jive Forums, and could eventually bring that to our larger corporate environment.

And then there were the intangibles: elegant design, nice support forum, fast-cycle of new versions, they had just received a new round of funding that they were targeting for Clearspace development, etc. etc

Since there really aren't a lot of alternatives in this space (as we defined it) it made the choice pretty easy.

And, I'm pleased to say, we haven't regretted it once. That's not to say we don't run into problems, but we don't regret our choice.

[Pat B.]

Hi Chuck,

Thanks for your helpful response.

As it turns out, much of the selection criteria you referenced is common with our project. In fact, we are building a site for business users but with a strong dash of collaboration and "social networking", in addition to some significant content management. Clearspace seems to have the right balance among those elements.

I was hoping that we could continue this conversation offline. In fact, since I am your neighbor (see email address) - and if you are emanable to this - we might be able to get the project teams together (phone or in person) to compare notes and lessons learned - both in implementing CS as well as the overall topic of what it takes to make collaboration happen.

In any case, thanks for your thoughts and help.

Pat

[Chuck Hollis]

Yes, theoretically, I'd like to help out. I've already had a half-dozen offline conversations on this topic.

The problem from a practical perspective is finding time.

I'll drop you a note.

[Michael S.]

Hi, Chuck.

Having insight into your requirements and experiences with Clearspace to-date was extremely helpful. Thanks.

I just wanted to check in to see what your experience has been like since your original post.

Were you able to solve your LDAP/SSO integration issue? Do you guys try to do silent sign-on using Active Directory credentials, or active sign-on is sufficient for your needs?

Have you guys encountered any other gotchas worth mentioning?

Have any of the issues you previously mentioned (like the handling of whitespace with the Text Editor) been resolved for you?

Thanks in advance,
Mike

[Chuck Hollis]

Hi Michael

The experiences with Clearspace has generally been good since going live over two months ago.

The difficulties associated with LDAP/SSO integration were probably due more to our own byzantine existing implementation, rather than any limitation of Clearspace.

We do "silent sign on". Clicking on the "login" field in Clearspace causes you to be registered in Clearspace using your AD/LDAP credentials, as well as consuming an additional license.

There are pros and cons to this approach, but it's OK.

As far as the text editor, we understand that Jive is working on something for early next year. In the meantime, we've all kind of learned to make peace with the damn thing. It hasn't held us back, as an example.

The only real "gotcha" is the need for two administrative roles. One needs to be technology-facing: running the environment, upgrades, config, backups, bug fixes, etc.

The other is more user-facing: here's how you do things, here's best practices for the environment, etc.

The tech-facing role doesn't have to be full time. In our environment, the user-facing role is full time, and we could use more.

Hope this helps.

[KenF]

Chuck, you mentioned a slick mobile option - I don't see that on the Clearspace site. Are you talking about the email notification & reply capability, which would work on something like a Blackberry or were you talking about something else?

Ken

[Chuck Hollis]

Hi Ken

We're in casual discussions with the Jive folks around what might be required for "email bridging".

Given that we all live in an email culture, how can we push content to email users (already there), but -- more importantly -- have them easily push content (respond, post) back into the environment.

We think that will be important, not only for us, but for other organizations in our situation.

I am resisting the temptation to build the interfaces myself, and am hoping that Jive can do this as part of standard product (albeit at potentially extra cost) at some point.

[Renee S.]

Hi Chuck,

We are in the process of setting up a Clearspace pilot project. Any information you can share with us on configuring LDAP/SSO integration would be helpful. We're using Netegrity SSO. If possible, the team would like to ask you a few questions.

Thanks,
REnee

[Chuck Hollis]

I'm not going to be much help here.

Not only do we have a different environment, I wasn't anywhere close to how it got done.

I believe we ended up contracting with Jive to do the work.