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Jive alternatives: Beezy’s intelligent workplace

Matthew Banks
7/1/20 6:20 PM

Every beginning must have an end, and the Jive era is no different. 

From its initial market entrance in 2001 to its acquisition by customer experience (CX) provider Aurea in 2017, it’s been centripetal to countless collaborative efforts across the world. 

Jive credits itself as the creator of the social intranet, however, for many, the platform hasn’t kept pace with its digitally transforming IT architecture. Following Aurea’s 2017 announcement, we’ve seen more and more enterprises make the jump from Jive and explore new intranet solutions. 

jive alternative

Three reasons to migrate off of Jive 

Jive does a nice job of combining many of the necessary tools and functionality of an Intranet with the power of enterprise social, using communities to develop crowdsourcing “hubs” to improve internal and partner/customer knowledge capture and sharing. However, Jive’s capabilities leave much to the imagination — it lacks the breadth and depth of SharePoint’s many capabilities. Within Jive, community activities are integrated with business processes through a siloed solution that is decoupled from the corporate IT stack and governance model. 

But the key differentiation between SharePoint and Jive – and the reason some customers end up selecting Jive – is the social capability of the platform. It’s all about the user experience (UX). For organizations that want an enterprise social experience, SharePoint simply did not offer a palpable alternative. 

However, organizations have heard this call for a better end-to-end product––and now, there are many different alternatives for users looking to migrate off their intranet and find Jive alternatives. 

1. Struggling customer support

Since 2017’s acquisition by Aurea, Jive’s customer support has experienced turbulent structural changes that have seriously impacted their customer’s experience and success. If customizing your Jive platform was easier, this might not be a big problem. However, customizing Jive configurations can be both lengthy and costly. Even the smallest changes require the support of a specialist consulting service that ultimately hinders your ability to respond quickly to changing demands. 

2. Lack of product roadmap 

For many, buying legacy and outdated products past their prime is a successful business strategy. When HCL purchased Connections, we witnessed this similar decline of software — there’s a business around acquiring aging platforms and housing them to their demise, and this can be extremely profitable. However, for users, this lack of product roadmap means Jive is likely to become obsolete as its competitors continue to push enhancements. 

3. Stagnant software 

Many businesses are concerned for the future of their social collaboration on Jive and are looking for alternative software solutions to replace their stagnant intranet provider. Stagnating work environments are never ideal, but when it comes to your corporate communications network and social capabilities (especially with the ever-prevalent remote work), this isn’t somewhere organizations can compromise without risking talent, employee satisfaction and productivity. In a society where social collaboration and communication is everything, there’s no room for stagnation. 

Exploring alternative collaboration software to Jive

There are many different product offerings on the market that resemble Jive in its core features––Microsoft SharePoint, Yammer, Igloo––and yet, time and time again, Microsoft SharePoint has been deemed the top alternative to Jive’s intranet. 

SharePoint is a powerful platform in many ways, but let’s be honest: it has struggled with the social enterprise functionalities of Jive. In 2013, Microsoft recognized this shortcoming by investing in its social capabilities, and the previous year’s acquisition of Yammer changed their strategy again, providing some new social capabilities but muddling the customer experience and platform’s positioning. 

Customers want a native, integrated social collaboration experience — not a disconnected experience across multiple tools and platforms.

You want a platform that reflects the quality of your brand and is tailored to support your unique business needs; a native, integrated social collaboration experience—not a disconnected experience across multiple tools and platforms.

For most enterprise customers who made the move to Jive, the constraining factor that caused them to move away from SharePoint — whether on-premises or online through Office 365 — was the disconnected social experience. Of course, there are customers who run both SharePoint and Jive side by side, using the former as their document and knowledge management repository and to power many of their business applications, and the latter to manage all of their communities and social interactions. Jive provides limited SharePoint and Office integration, but the primary activity and content creation happens within Jive, and as a result this creates yet another information silo.

We speak with many customers who would love to simplify and consolidate onto Office 365 — but they are concerned about migrating hundreds, if not thousands of Jive communities, conversations, and content, or how a migration project would impact the UX. 

They want to know: What am I giving up by moving to Office 365? In our experience, 100% of Jive communities, conversations and content can map to the Office 365 platform about— with some customization needed to maintain the same user and community experience. With the unknown costs and unknown risks of migration, many of these customers are staying put on Jive, making it an expensive information and collaboration silo. A Jive migration to Office 365, in the long run, won’t only be cost-effective for your organization, but also vastly improve your digital workplace experience for your employees––accelerating workforce productivity and collaboration.

Migrate to Beezy’s Intelligent Workplace 

Choosing a Jive alternative might not be easy, but we have good news for Jive users: Beezy provides 100% end-to-end migration capabilities of communities, conversations and content to the Office 365 environment. With our proven migration methodology with T-Systems, Beezy can close this solution gap between Jive, Office 365 and Yammer. 

Beezy can migrate 100% of Jive communities, conversations, and content to the Office 365 platform.

So you can get the best of both worlds: the most robust Intranet platform on the market (SharePoint) combined with flexible and powerful enterprise social capabilities of Jive — but built on SharePoint, for SharePoint.

Beezy is not an add-on or social “skin” across the top of SharePoint, but a fully-integrated software solution. Here’s how: 

1. True two-way integration

We provide software that makes SharePoint a streamlined experience across online and on-prem environments, including Yammer. If you’ve spent time and resources building out Yammer communities, none of that work will be lost. 

Beezy can provide true two-way integration between Yammer and SharePoint, and we can deliver this on-prem, on the cloud, or in hybrid environments. In fact, you don’t even have to use Yammer, we unify your SharePoint experience across farms, topologies, and geographies with a single enterprise social collaboration solution.

2.Enhanced user experiences

In true social-intranet style, Beezy extends your social experience beyond what either SharePoint or Yammer provide on their own, delivering an award-winning user experience and cutting-edge enterprise collaboration capabilities. Group and Project spaces, photo albums, Q&A sites, idea elevation, and many other social tools that only seem to be available in the leading consumer-based platforms are available in Beezy, giving your teams a seamlessly integrated and social experience regardless of environment. 

3. Free and accurate migration mapping 

Our experienced migration team will support you throughout the entire process. We can map anything within your Jive environment (in addition to HCL (IBM) Connections and Sitrion/Limeade) to Office 365 and Beezy, allowing you to consolidate your collaboration platforms to the Microsoft stack without the fear of losing data or community momentum. 

It’s not a matter of just moving legacy content – we create the necessary placeholders in Office 365 for every content type and social artifact, which makes migration possible. This includes user profiles, personal news feeds, documents, discussions, picture libraries, calendars, blogs, tasks, metadata, and more.

All of this and a dynamic, customizable, and award-winning UX. There really is nothing like it on the market today. If you are a Jive customer and you would like to know more about how you can make the move to the cloud with Office 365, it’s time to take a look at Beezy. 

Contact us if you would like a demo to see how Beezy can help you move your Jive environment (or HCL (IBM) Connections, or Limeade) to Microsoft 365.

jive alternative migration guide

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