Jive Clearspace Best#2598 C8

As the leading provider of online community solutions, we at Jive Software have our fingers on the pulse of what’s happening with new developments in Web technology and usage. Our observations led us to create Clearspace, a

phenomenal team collaboration solution that will revolutionize the way your company does business.

In this document, we explain the latest Web trends and technologies, and how Clearspace integrates them into a single

solution for use inside the enterprise. We also offer best practices for using Clearspace’s next-generation Web-based capabilities to your business advantage. Finally, we provide guidelines for organizing your content, encouraging user

participation, gaining executive buy-in, addressing some likely challenges, and demonstrating a return on your investment.

Content Type: Blogs ..............................................................5

Content Type: Discussions ....................................................6

Content Type: Collaborative Documents ...............................7

Content Type: Profiles ...........................................................8

Understanding the User Types ..............................................8

Selecting Permissions to Assign to Users and Groups .........9

Leverage Existing User Authentication Systems ...................9

RSS Feeds and Email Notifications ....................................10

Getting Executive Buy-in .....................................................12

Encouraging Participation ...................................................12

In Closing ............................................................................13

Right under your nose, as you’ve been sifting through mountains of email, struggling to find information on a shared drive, and googling the Internet for information, a

revolution has been quietly taking place. A revolution that is fundamentally changing the way we use the Web. This

revolution has turned the Web into a place where you

ask questions and get answers in online communities, collaborate on projects, subscribe to news and information

you need, and express opinions. In this new Web, you

can also share your knowledge with the world, find others with similar interests or expertise, see online presence

information and communicate with others instantly in real

time. The Web has become a place where the individual

actually has a voice and can participate. Collectively, these

tools define the second generation of the Web known as Web 2.0, where Web 1.0 was the traditional web site

and homepage—a one-way street where individuals or corporations posted information, and web users could

only review the material. In contrast, Web 2.0 tools and

capabilities include collaboration technologies such as:

Blogs, where you can express ideas and

opinions—from product development schedules

to what you considered during product design

to ideas for a new marketing campaign—and for others to provide feedback on those thoughts.

Forums, an online community where you can ask questions and get answers from other community

members about anything from how to change

an investment allocation in your 401K plan to

installing Oracle’s latest database on the RedHat Linux operating system.

Wikis, an online space where you can collaboratively author content with others, giving

credit to contributors and keeping track of versions as the content evolves.

RSS feeds that allow you to determine what

content you receive based on your needs and

interests, and how you receive it—via email, in

your personalized browser page, or within the

company’s main intranet or Web page.

Tagging, the phenomenon of associating keywords with Web content so that you and others who

use similar descriptive language can find or later retrieve the content. Tagging is classification by the user, and not by a formal taxonomist.

Instant messaging and online presence that allow

you to communicate immediately with someone

because you can see that they are online.

Even before Andrew McAfee, Associate Professor at the

Harvard Business School, coined the term “Enterprise 2.0” in the spring of 2006, we at Jive Software recognized

the tremendous potential that these Enterprise 2.0 tools

had for the business environment. The potential to create

a central repository for the collective intelligence of an

enterprise, and to create it in such a way that information

could be retrieved. The potential to identify subject matter

experts within the enterprise. The potential to make team collaboration far more efficient and, quite honestly, fun. A way to transform the way businesses do business

by taking advantage of the collective intelligence of all employees in the enterprise.

Many Jive customers have used our discussion forums

and classic knowledge base tools for internal business collaboration purposes. Such practical application of

these tools within the business further supported our

assumptions about their potential. These customers

asked us to build a product that integrated the Web 2.0 technologies described above, while simultaneously

providing the security, scalability, reliability and control

mechanisms required for modern business practices. We

listened. Clearspace combines blogs, wikis, forums, RSS, and tagging capabilities with additional innovative features

into a thoughtfully designed team collaboration solution

for the business environment—one that understands your

company’s most important asset, employees, and their collective knowledge.

The following sections further discuss these tools in the

context of best practices and approaches that enable you

to work, communicate, and collaborate with others more effectively. With that in mind, the first question to address is organizing your content in the system.

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We designed Clearspace to be as flexible as possible so that you could determine the best way to set up your

online community. To organize your content you need to

understand the content hierarchy: space > sub-space > tag group. You can have deeper sub-spaces with tag groups—the depth of your sub-spaces depends on how many logical divisions you need.

When planning your spaces think about the reasons users will come to the online community and the way in

which your organization is structured by functional area,

project, or topic. Each space and sub-space can have different sets of user permissions, so you can control

user access and capabilities at each level. You can also

expose portions of the space to external partners using

Clearspace’s powerful and secure permissioning system. We will describe permissions in greater detail later in this

document.

Typically an internal community is organized by functional

area. You could set up spaces and tag groups to mirror

these areas. For example:

Marketing (space)

Marketing Communications (sub-space)

Product Management (sub-space)

Sales (space)

Channel Sales (sub-space)

Business Development (sub-space)

Direct Sales (sub-space)

Human Resources (space)

Benefits (sub-space)

The hierarchy terms “space” and “sub-space” provide a structure for the content based on logical divisions within

the organization. Users upload, create, and tag content

within these areas. In contrast, tag groups dynamically

group that content based on a set of defined tags. This dynamic categorization of content is especially useful

because logical divisions of content often emerge over

time as users add content.

When you create or upload content within a specific space, that content cannot be shared with or tagged within other

spaces. This same content sharing and tagging construct

applies to sub-spaces. Because tagging and tag groups are so critical to retrieving and dynamically categorizing

information, be extremely deliberate when creating your

space, sub-space, and structure. Make sure you do not accidentally wall off or silo content in a space or sub-space that actually needs to be shared with and tagged

within other areas. Creating the ideal space structure

may take some time; fortunately, Clearspace’s powerful search capabilities still ensure that you can find relevant information.

We recommend the following approaches when planning

your content structure:

Use a space to group multiple concepts or functional

areas. The example above creates spaces based on

business divisions or departments.

Avoid creating too many sub-spaces. As mentioned

above, you lose one of the main benefits of tagging—dynamic categorization of data related to a particular

topic—when you wall off or silo content.

Create a more general hierarchy to start with. Once you

launch your space, its users will show you how they want

and need data categorized based on tags.

Start with more general topics. General topics make it easier to manage your content as your tags and tag

groups expand and divide over time.

In the previous section, we discussed tagging and tag

groups in the context of setting up your space. This section

provides additional insight into and best practices for using

tagging and tag groups. In Clearspace, content authors can

tag their content with words or terms to categorize where

that content displays within the system and to help users

locate that content in future searches. In some respects,

tags function much like keywords do in other knowledge management systems; however, one of the primary failings of old-school knowledge management conventions is that information becomes siloed and difficult to find. The effective use of tags allows you to overcome this issue

because content is automatically categorized by community

members with the terms they use to describe the content.

In addition, content can reside in different logical groups

using tag groups. Although Clearspace provides extensive

search capabilities, we recommend tagging all content to

greatly enhance information retrieval.

In Clearspace you can add tags to individual blog threads,

discussion threads, and documents. Any time a user adds

a tag, that tag word is added to Clearspace’s complete tags list. Clearspace displays the most frequently used

tags in a “tag cloud” called “Popular Tags,” with the tags that are assigned to more content having a larger font and

located near the front of the list. When you click a tag from the Popular Tags list or the complete Tags list, Clearspace

then generates a collection of any content within the space

tagged with that word.

For example, if a strategic planning team co-authors the organization’s strategic plan, each contributor would add the tags that best describe the document. One person

could associate the tags strategic_plan and focus_areas.

Another could associate the tags strategic_plan, goals,

and objectives. And a third could associate the tags

long_range_planning and company_goals. All terms would

be added to the tag list, so any user could click any of the associated tags from either the complete tag list or Popular

Tags list, to display a list of content that would include the

strategic plan document.

Use tags in the following ways to get the most from this

capability:

Use tags to find similar or related content. Referring

to the above example, find additional content related to organizational goals by examining all the tags people

associated with the strategic plan document. Most likely, you will find other terms that relate to the concept of organizational goals. In this case, the tags company_goals

and long_range_planning appear relevant. By clicking on either tag, you would likely find the type of content you were looking for.

Use tag groups to dynamically group content related

to a discrete topic. In the above example, if you wanted

to find all content related to overall company plans, an administrator could create a tag group called Company

Planning and specify the following tags for the group:

focus_areas, strategic_plan, goals, objectives, long_range_

planning, company_goals. Now any documents, blog posts,

or discussions tagged with any of these words would be

listed by simply selecting that tag group.

Use the Popular Tags list to quickly tag content.

Clearspace displays this list on each space and sub-space page, as well as at the bottom of the page when you are

editing content. To tag content when editing or creating it,

click any appropriate tags in the list of Popular Tags that appears just beneath the Tags editable text box.

Use the tag clouds from the Popular Tags list and the

Tags list to quickly locate groups of related content.

Select a single tag within a tag cloud to display a collection

of content associated with that tag. The larger font size of

popular tags in a tag cloud is a useful way to see concepts

and terms that have been democratically “voted” on by the community.

Develop an enterprise vocabulary. This actually happens

automatically as Clearspace identifies popular tags. You can easily pick out the tags that are most used by their font size in a tag cloud: the larger the font, the more content

associated with that tag. As employees review and access

content from the Popular Tags list, they discover what the

majority of employees call something, and an enterprise

vocabulary tends to emerge.

Clearspace provides four main types of content that you

can include in any space: blogs, collaborative documents,

threaded discussions and profiles. In the following sections we describe each content type and discuss how you can

leverage the unique characteristics of each to work more effectively.

A blog, or Web log, is essentially an online journal. People

use blogs to document almost any topic imaginable,

including their opinions, plans, product reviews, and vision

for the future. People can read blog posts, comment on

them, and even link to them from within their own blogs with a “trackback.” Blogs are often free to create and use, and typically provide templates in which people can

easily post text, images, audio, and even video. Blogs

remove the barrier of having to know how to create a Web page to be able post to the Web. As a result, blogs have

become extremely popular over the past four or five years. Your Clearspace administrator manages blogs with user

permissions, enabling all or just a subset of your users to

have personal blogs. Your administrator can also set up

space-level or team blogs, which allow multiple users to contribute to a single blog within a space.

In Clearspace, a blog is an online place to provide

information or express opinions. Unlike discussions or documents, blogs are visible across communities; several spaces can subscribe to a specific individual’s or group’s blog.

Use a discussion as a forum to ask questions and receive answers. For example, a Human Resources (HR) manager could use the Discussion area to prompt a discussion

among other HR employees by asking the question, “How should we structure our job-sharing policy?” Responses from the other HR employees help the HR manager develop a draft policy. At that point the HR manager could post the main points of the draft policy in a blog and pay

attention to employee comments to see if they would

support the policy.

Businesses use blogs to communicate with the public and

to communicate internally. Although this section focuses

on internal blog use, public-facing blogs serve several important purposes:

To bridge the gap between customer and company

by letting the customer feel that their views and

input are important and help influence company decisions.

To foster innovation for the company through input

from customers passionate about that company’s products or services.

To increase search engine rankings due to the volumes of fresh content containing keywords and links from other blogs or sites—all key factors in search engine algorithms.

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As users add content, the differences between

a blog, a discussion, and a document become

important as guides for choosing the best format.

Use the following as a guide to understanding what

characterizes each.

Blog Post

Discussion

Wiki Document

Within the organization, blogs serve a very different

purpose—chief among them is to capture and maintain

valuable employee knowledge and thought processes. Employees use blogs to post information, comment

on posts, and access those interactions from a single

place. If your administrator provides you the appropriate

permissions, you can quickly set up a personal blog through your profile. You can access an alphabetical list of all blogs in your space by clicking spaces from the navigation menu at the top, and then selecting Blogs.

Alternatively, open a user’s profile and click their personal blog, or open a team blog from within a space. To post to

your personal blog, click the New > Blog Post from the menu at the top of the page or post directly from your

profile.

Before setting up a personal or team blog in Clearspace,

determine what you hope to achieve through its use—

perhaps even use your blog to share your thoughts. The

following list provides some possible benefits and ideas for using blogs to reap those benefits.Reduce email use/abuse. Use your blog instead of email

to post information and receive feedback. Send an initial email to employees you want to read the post, include a

link to the post, and request that all further communication occurs within the blog. Blogs help users locate information

more easily because the communication occurs in a single

linear thread, not in multiple email threads.

Manage project communications. Conduct project

communications via a team blog—post progress reports,

issues encountered, and links to relevant information. Add tags to blog entries to enable users to easily retrieve the

business processes and knowledge captured by the team blog.

Tag blog entries for better information retrieval. Add

tags to blog posts to make information highly retrievable from Clearspace. Later in this document, we discuss tags

more fully, and how they can be best used in Clearspace.

Moderate blogs with a light touch. Establish general

blogging guidelines and post them, along with your

blogging policy, but then back away and let employees blog and comment. If someone posts or comments

inappropriately, deal with the employee directly,

quickly, and perhaps even visibly, and then remove the unacceptable content. A swift and visible response clarifies your company’s position on such behavior.

Encourage members of your braintrust to blog. Each

organization has a few people who have been with the

organization the longest, developed the most patents,

led successful marketing campaigns, or generally retain knowledge in their heads critical to the organization’s competitive advantage. If these employees leave the

company, their knowledge leaves with them. Encourage these employees to blog so that their knowledge is always available from the central repository.

If you decide to have public-facing blogs we recommend the following:

Choose a good company representative. A corporate

blogger should be somebody who is a good writer, is

knowledgeable about the company or the topic being blogged about, and has a little charisma. A sense of humor

is almost always a good thing for a blog, but above all, be

real.

Post regularly. Many blog fans check their favorite blogs daily. At a minimum, Debbie Weil, author of The Corporate Blogging Book, recommends that you post at least twice a

week. If you don’t have a single employee who has time to blog regularly, consider forming a blogging team to share

the responsibility, or even consider hiring a writer/editor to

serve as your corporate blogger.

Respond to customer comments quickly. Make sure customers know someone is paying attention to what they say by responding to their comments quickly. Also reward them for providing feedback. Send them company hats, t-shirts, or even coupons for a product discount.

Forums, called “discussions” in Clearspace, provide a medium in which you can post questions and receive

answers from other users. Discussions enable you to

overcome the handicap inherent to static knowledge resources—running into a dead end when search results

don’t answer your question or deliver relevant content. With discussions, when a traditional search fails to deliver

the information you need, you can post your question to

the broader community. Unlike blogs, discussions support multiple, or branched, threads as people respond to

comments on the original question. To start a Clearspace

discussion, click New > Discussion from the top menu.

Use discussions in the following ways to get the most from

this feature.

Find answers to questions. For example, if a sales

person needs feedback on how to demo a specific product feature, he could post a question to the Sales team: “Has anybody developed a good approach to demonstrating

feature X to clients?” As sales team members respond, a rich discussion develops with ideas useful to all sales team

members.

Reduce email use/abuse. Companies often use email to

ask questions of larger groups of people, many of whom have no need to be on the email. In addition, emails

generate multiple threads with duplicate information due to

reply-to-all and email forwarding features. With Clearspace discussions, a question and all responses reside in one

place.

Assess content usefulness. Clearspace includes a

feature that allows the person who posted the question

to mark a response as “Helpful” or “Correct.” Encourage employees to use this feature because it helps others

quickly locate the valuable responses within a discussion thread. In addition, employees receive points when their

responses are marked as Helpful or Correct, and these points give them status within the community through

Clearspace status levels.

Convert discussions into documents. Because

employees use discussion to work through questions, issues, share ideas, and provide information, discussions

capture important organizational knowledge. When combined with reader comments and further author

responses, blogs form the basis for an information-filled paper. For example, if customers flood a customer service department with complaints about a defective product, a

customer service representative could use discussions

to collaborate with colleagues to successfully resolve the

issue. When additional representatives comment with

what worked for them and someone turns the discussion thread into a document and edits it, the customer service

department has an internal best practices document for

handling the issue and an external article their clients

can use. Adding these converted threaded discussions to

FAQs and the organization’s knowledge base ensures that information and knowledge is used and reused effectively throughout an organization.

Tag, tag, tag. In Clearspace, leverage the power of

tagging to maximize search by encouraging users to tag

all discussions they initiate and any documents they create

from threaded discussions.

Moderate in moderation. Because discussions, like blogs, are internal, we recommend that you inform employees

of the corporate guidelines and policies for discussions.

Avoid moderating a post unless it is clearly out of line.

When employees know that you trust them, they rarely disappoint you. If anything, moderation should only amount

to suggestions that help people stay on topic.

Without a doubt, today’s most popular collaborative document site, or wiki, is Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org), the online encyclopedia authored by anyone who wants

to contribute to it. According to Wikipedia’s December 18, 2006, entry, a wiki is “a type of Web site that allows the visitors to easily add, remove, and otherwise edit

content.” In addition to content such as text, wiki entries often include links to related articles, blog entries, and references. Because wikis support multiple authors and editors, popular views and new terminology tend to

emerge. Because of their flexibility, wikis can also quickly become confusing. Wikis traditionally have very little in the way of content or structure permissions control. It is not

unusual for the structure of wikis to become inconsistent and finding relevant information becomes difficult. Because of these challenges, Clearspace was designed to allow

organizations to control the structure and workflow of information deliberately, making it a more productive and safe collaborative solution.

Clearspace provides two ways for people to collaborate on

documentation: File-based and Collaborative (wiki style).

File-based Content Collaboration is the traditional

document management system in which you check out a file (any file type, not just text-based) edit it locally on your computer, and then upload the edited version to the file management system. The system automatically creates a

new version of the file, but provides access to all previous versions. In Clearspace, to add a new file to the system’s central repository select New > Document from the menu

at the top, select Upload File as the Document Type, click the Create New Document button, browse to it on your

computer, and then click Publish.

Collaborative Documents (wiki-style) in Clearspace are text-based documents created, edited, and stored within Clearspace. In the long run, collaborative documents may

be best for co-authoring text-based documents because authors can’t forget to upload their changed versions, as they can with file-based documents.

With both types of documents, Clearspace ensures

that users can’t overwrite each others’ edits; when a user checks out a file for editing, the file locks out other contributors until the user editing it checks it in.

Clearspace makes wiki-style authoring ideal for the business environment by including features that support

the natural workflow found when multiple people are required to contribute to, review, and approve documents

before publishing. Although users can upload files other than documents, you will primarily use these workflow features with text-based documents. Both file-based and collaborative documents support these workflow features.

Add Collaborators. When a user creates or uploads a file, the first decision they make is whether or not the document will be co-authored, needs reviewers, or must be approved before publishing. Clearspace documents allow the

original “Creator” of the document to add collaborators—Authors, Reviewers, and Approvers—to their document.

Authors can edit the document, Reviewers can read it

and provide feedback, and Approvers must all sign off on the document before it can be published publicly. The

ability to add collaborators depends on whether or not

the administrator has left this feature open to all users.

In most organizations, the authority to author and decide

what information gets published, or deemed “approved” by the organization, is limited to specific individuals. In Clearspace, the administrator creates permissions for

Communities and assigns rules on who can author and

approve documents.

Use Feedback Mechanisms. As collaborators on a

document edit and review the document, they can

provide feedback, explain what they changed, or initiate discussions in the Author Discussion area below the

document. Once the author receives necessary approvals

and publishes the document, they can receive further

feedback from additional readers via the Document Comments area, also found just below the document.

Review Versions with Track Changes. Clearspace saves

each version of a document so that authors can compare

any two versions to see what was changed. If necessary,

an author can revert to an earlier version.

In addition to using the collaborative authoring workflow features included in Clearspace, you should consider

applying the following best practices and approaches.

Co-author papers. Clearspace documents are ideal for

co-authoring when individuals are responsible for portions of a document. For example, if a team is applying for a

grant, create a basic outline with placeholder headers,

add collaborators as authors, and request that co-authors develop individual sections such as the background, objectives, plan, and budget. Co-authoring is also useful

when a document has multiple stakeholders, and each wants to ensure that the document includes specific information or viewpoints.

Tag document entries. Request that employees tag

documents or files they create, upload, edit, or review. Impress upon them that tagging allows them to retrieve

documents more easily.

Upload existing content to the central repository.

Before you had Clearspace, your organization stored its

content on shared drives and on various employee local

drives. Once you launch Clearspace, ask employees to upload all valuable documents from their computer

into the central repository, and then consider assigning

individuals to upload material from shared drives and other

backup sources. Set aside time for employees to upload documents so they don’t feel that they’re taking time away from more pressing work.

Rate documents to help indicate which are most

valuable. Encourage users to use Clearspace’s rating system to assign a value of one to five stars to indicate a document’s usefulness. Clearspace averages these ratings and associates it with the document to help viewers quickly determine if other employees considered a document

valuable.

In large organizations, locating experts can be difficult. Employees can be in different buildings, states, or

even countries. The sheer number of employees can

make finding subject matter experts all but impossible. Clearspace user profiles, along with user status levels and document ratings, assist employees in locating the experts

within their organization.

Take advantage of Clearspace user profiles in the following ways to locate organization experts.

Review user status levels and content ratings/

assessments. Understand which users provide the most

valuable content by looking at the discussion author’s assessment of other collaborator’s posts as either “Helpful” or “Correct.” In Clearspace users accumulate points for how much they participate and the how valuable their

contributions are. These points help determine their status

level in the system. Glance at an employee’s user status level to see if the broader community considers that person

to be a valuable contributor.

Include additional fields in user profiles. Administrators

can increase the ability to accurately search for experts

by adding fields to the default set of fields in user profiles. These fields can be required or optional, and may be presented as a pick list or in an editable text box. For example, if someone wants to locate a patent lawyer within

their organization, include Title as a user profile field to allow users to search for employees with a title of Lawyer

or Patent Lawyer.

Include contact information in profiles. Ask employees to include location and phone contact information so that

those who want to communicate with individuals in person

or on the phone have quick access to necessary contact information within Clearspace.

Recognize who does the work. As a manager, view

user status levels and the actual content your employees

contribute to gauge which employees are adding the most

value to the organization.

Identify who is online and available for communication.

Clearspace shows you who is online and available by

looking at the online status icon of their user profile. You can also see the entire list, in alphabetical order, of all

employees who are online by visiting the People area of

your spaces dropdown list, and clicking the “Who’s Online” tab.

Like our Jive Forums online community solution, Clearspace provides extensive control over user and

content permissions. Your Clearspace administrator will

use the Clearspace Administration Console to set up

permissions. While your administrator may determine

permissions, it’s more likely that a team of individuals responsible for managing your Clearspace implementation

will discuss user types and permissions while developing

the space’s content structure. Once the content structure, types of users, and content and user permissions have

been determined, the administrator can implement those

permissions through the Administration Console.

Clearspace ships with two default user types that cannot

be deleted: Anyone and Registered Users. Once a user

registers, they can be assigned permissions as a User or

as part of a Group. Anyone, Registered, User, and Group

are the main types of Clearspace users.

An Anyone user is simply anyone who visits the online

community. This user type is designed to be associated

with a guest or to allow anonymous access. Anyone

permissions are a blanket set of permissions for anyone who visits. Think hard about what you want people to be able to do anonymously, but weigh that against the need to

engage people to encourage them to participate.

A Registered User is someone who has entered your online

community’s required registration information. Registered Users permissions are globally assigned permissions

you give to anyone who registers. Participants must be

registered in order to participate in threaded discussions.

Although you can assign a registered user permissions

as an individual, forming user groups and assigning

permissions to groups saves time because you can add

and remove permissions to multiple users simultaneously.

Determine the user groups you’ll need before launching the space. For example, group users according to employee

job function or department. User and Group permissions

can be assigned on a space or sub-space basis.

Clearspace provides the following capabilities for users and

groups. You can assign all or any of these permissions to

your users and groups:

How Jive Clearspace Applies PermissionsClearspace permissions are applied when a user accesses

content. First, the application examines the global user

permissions—the permissions the user has within the

entire Clearspace instance. Then it applies any group

permissions that the user belongs to. After applying those

“user” permissions, it applies content permissions at the following levels:

Space (Called Global in the Administrator Guide). Specify the permissions you want all users to have

when they log into your space and access space

content. Add these permissions to users or groups

at the sub-space levels. Sub-space. When the user accesses content, the

system checks the user’s space permissions to see if they have been modified from the original space-level permissions. If so, when the user access

content in that space or related sub-spaces, the space permissions override the space permissions.

For example, in a Marketing Department space all users may have space permissions that allow them to view and

post content in the general community, but only those

Product Managers with the appropriate permissions may

be able to author and approve content, such as brochures

and pricing information, that can be accessed by the sales

organization.

If you have an existing user authentication system

and/or an LDAP Directory, integrate these systems with

your Clearspace application to offer members log-in convenience and save administrative time managing user

permissions.

Single Sign-on (SSO) Integration. Many web sites require

visitors to authenticate themselves before they can access

site content. By integrating with a Single Sign-on (SSO) system, users log in one time to authenticate and access

web site content and the online community. We make the integration process simple, using the Auth Token and Auth Factory libraries. If you lack in-house expertise to do this integration, our experienced Professional Services staff can

help.

LDAP/Active Directory Integration. Avoid manual

entry of user and permissions data by integrating your

existing LDAP user database with your online community

membership database. Refer to our Administrator’s Guide for more information.

We’ve discussed moderating content earlier in the document, indicating that moderation is typically a

lesser concern with internal Clearspace use. However, Clearspace includes comprehensive auto-moderation features that you may choose to configure to ward off user abuse or improper posts. We discuss those features, as

well as provide some recommendations in this section.

Develop Your Usage Policy. Design a usage policy

to ward off abuse or inadvertent posts that are not

appropriate for the community. Early warning can make a big difference, and can prevent your members from

having a negative experience. Make the consequences for unacceptable behavior clear. Derek Powazek, author of Design for Community, recommends that you include a

statement to the effect of: “We retain the right to remove content or deny individuals access anytime we feel it is

necessary.” Some ideas for possible policy statements to

include are:

No profanity.

Treat others with respect.

Stay on topic.

Use filters and interceptors. A filter dynamically formats message content before it posts to the space, while an

interceptor, based on specific criteria, accepts, modifies, or rejects an entire incoming message before it enters

the space. Filters and interceptors can be applied to

discussions, document comments, and blog comments.

Because you cannot apply filters or interceptors to documents and blog posts, make sure that you are comfortable with the employees you allow to author those

types of content when setting permissions. When you

don’t want any part of a post or comment with an offending word to enter the space before an action is taken, use an interceptor instead of a filter.

Apply a profanity filter. This filter automatically detects words in the profanity list and replaces them with ***.

Use the list of common profanity terms from our site as a

starting point, and then conduct a team-building exercise at the local watering hole to augment this list. The profanity

filter is the most commonly used filter, and is one we recommend that you use.

Encourage employees to report abuse. The Report

Abuse feature gives your users the ability to help police

the community by allowing them to report an offensive

post to the moderator. A reported post can automatically

be taken out of the thread when the number of users that

report the post exceeds an administrator-specified number. The post is put into a moderation queue, and must receive

moderator approval before it can be placed back into the thread.

Clearspace provides additional features that will help you

further optimize the value of your implementation. You

can take advantage of RSS feeds, modify the appearance of your Clearspace instance, tie in Web services

with Clearspace profile data, and access Clearspace documents through traditional file-based systems. We discuss these features and others next.

Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, allows you to feed

constantly updated Web content, including blog posts,

discussion threads, or news feeds, into a variety of

places, such as a specific location within your web page or a personal feed reader such as MyYahoo or Google

Homepage. While email is a passive way to receive information, RSS lets you determine what you want to

receive. For example, the National Association for Public

Health Information Technology (NAPHIT) wanted to post information about public health IT and electronic medical

records into its main www.naphit.org page. They identified that iHealthbeat.org aggregated important health IT information and provided an RSS feed of that information.

The NAPHIT web site manager simply inserted a snippet of code in the NAPHIT main web page that essentially said, “Take content from the iHealthBeat.org site that has the following keywords—public health IT and electronic medical records—and place the links to the resulting articles at this location in my web site.” Now anytime iHealthbeat updates their content, NAPHIT automatically receives updated links to relevant content on the main NAPHIT page. Once you understand the power of RSS to provide the

business-critical information you need, you will take advantage of this easy-to-implement functionality. Until then, Clearspace provides email notifications to send you an email any time new content is posted to a blog thread,

blog, discussion, or document that interests you. Subscribe

to the notification from within the specific content that interests you by clicking Receive Email Notifications in the Actions area.

These best practices help you get the most from

Clearspace’s RSS and Email Notification capabilities.

Find out when new content is added or modified. Set

up RSS feeds from Clearspace to your personal RSS

reader or subscribe to email notifications for blog threads, project team blogs, discussion, or documents of interest

or importance to you. RSS feeds allow you to further filter the information by specifying the keywords that must be associated with the content for you to receive them.

Use Clearspace’s shortcut for RSS feeds. Clearspace

makes it easy for you to post to most of the popular RSS feed readers on the web, including MyYahoo! and Google

Reader. Click the orange RSS feed icon next to content that interests you to open a list of common RSS feed

readers or personalized homepage services. Select the

feed reader that you use to open a page in which you can

add the Clearspace RSS feed.

Use RSS feeds to pull users into Clearspace. Because

not everyone will immediately turn to Clearspace to access

content and collaborate, draw them in by posting RSS

feeds of the latest to blog posts and discussions on the

corporate intranet.

Clearspace themes allow you to customize the appearance

of your Clearspace interface. Include your company logo,

colors, font, navigation, and layout. Employees are more

likely to work in Clearspace if it feels like an extension of your web site or intranet. Refer to the Administrator’s Guide for more information on customizing your online

community’s appearance. Above all, employees should easily be able to locate content, respond to it, connect with

other employees, and perform any activities in your team

collaboration solution effortlessly.

Search for content using Clearspace’s comprehensive search capabilities. You can search for content by entering

key search terms in the Search text box. Further refine the search by limiting it to a specific space, content type, or length of time since post. You can also search user profiles and filter on fields. Make sure you add fields to user profiles so that users can more easily locate experts.

Use Web Services capability in Clearspace to integrate

existing applications with Clearspace. Clearspace includes

a number of Web service-enabled objects. The SOAP-based Web Services provided in Clearspace provides

the ability to easily enable space functionality and

expose content with your Web site or other Web-based applications. For example, if you want to show Clearspace

user profile information in an existing human resources application, use a Web service in the human resources

application code to let the human resources application

search for a person in Clearspace’s user profile, grab the relevant data, and display it in the human resources

application.

WebDAV lets users access Clearspace documents in

read-only format from the actual drive where the content is stored. Users simply navigate to it using their familiar

file navigation system. Accessing content this way may be convenient when a user wishes to attach a document to

an email or doesn’t want to log into Clearspace to read a document. To set up a WebDAV connection, you establish

a server connection to the server that houses your

Clearspace content. Files are stored in folders that parallel

the structure of your communities and sub-communities.

If you have a number of users who need to interact with

Clearspace via email, you might want to enable the Email

Reply feature. Clearspace allows users to post messages

by replying to notification emails they’ve subscribed to. All they need to do is reply directly to the email and their

reply is posted directly in Clearspace as if they’d logged in from their browser. Any files attached to their reply become attachments of the resulting content. Email Response is

a popular feature for management, sales or professional

services personnel who travel extensively and use PDAs to

stay connected.

Polls are an effective and easy-to-use way to get measurable feedback from your community. If you have the appropriate permissions, set up your poll with single or

multiple responses, specify when it should begin and end

and which individuals or groups can participate.

When you have a message you want to broadcast to users

of a specific space, but don’t require responses, use the Announcement feature in Clearspace. Announcements,

like blogs and discussions are a great substitute for group emails.

Before you launch Clearspace, you’ll need to overcome a couple of challenges—getting executive buy-in and convincing employees to adopt its use. This section tells

you how to address and overcome some of the challenges

you’ll encounter in launching your Clearspace instance.

Executives hold the purse strings and also need to back changes in the system for them to succeed. It’s critical that they understand how Clearspace can improve the

business. At a minimum, hand them this document so that

they can understand how they can benefit from online team collaboration.

Tell them who’s using Enterprise 2.0 solutions. Let

them know that as of December 14, 2006, 43 of the Fortune 500 had launched Enterprise 2.0 solutions (from: http://www.blogbusinesssummit.com/fortune500/index.

php?title=Main_Page), up from just 24 in March 2006 (from: http://www.socialtext.net/bizblogs/index.cgi). If the Fortune 500 companies are increasingly adopting these

solutions, they’re at least worth investigating.

Show a Return on Investment (ROI). Once you’ve launched Clearspace, you need to prove that it has been

worth the initial investment. Some ways to measure ROI

include:

Debunk the Myth that Success Might Overwhelm the

System. Another frequently raised concern is that if the

system succeeds through massive user participation, the

result could be an unmanageable volume of content. As

it turns out, the more people participate in these systems,

the higher quality the content it produces, and the more

apparent it is which content and people are most valuable

within the system. Wikipedia is a prime example. Anyone in the world is free to contribute it, yet users respect it as

a place for legitimate knowledge to be written, edited, and shared. Wikipedia produces some of the most in-depth discussions on terms and topics available; in fact, one study that compared accuracy of Wikipedia content to

equivalent encyclopedia content showed that Wikipedia had a higher degree of accurate information. In other

words, collaborative authoring works. In addition, tagging enables content to be found again and again. Clearspace

also scales to handle plenty of users and content—from

three users to three million. Overwhelming the system is a

non-issue.

Alex Barnett, a Microsoft employee and frequent blogger

about wikis, online communities, and blogs, brings up an important rule for these collaborative spaces. He says that “personal value must precede network value” for people to participate. In other words, there has to be a good answer

to the question, “What’s in it for me?” This is especially true for employees accustomed to the status quo of email and

disparate file storage systems. While employees mostly recognize that these systems have their problems, change

feels threatening. You have to make them want to use the system. Here are some ways to advance adoption.

Show executive buy-in and support. Have one or more executive level individuals blog. Just as external

blogging fosters a connection between a company and

its customers, hearing directly and regularly from the

CEO, with the option to comment on that person’s blog, can make an employee feel like a valued and trusted organization member. If you don’t have an executive level individual who is a good blogger, consider who within your

company is high profile and charismatic enough in a blog format to get the enthusiasm rolling.

Identify Clearspace evangelists in your organization.

Determine which employees can help you champion using

Clearspace. Likely candidates are employees who already use these tools in their personal life or who have been

informally using external blogs, forums, and wikis to help manage their projects. Encourage them to blog regularly,

post questions to a forum, and lead others through

collaborating on documents in Clearspace. Make sure they have the time to do this, so that using and evangelizing

Clearspace is as much a priority as any of their other

responsibilities.

Reward good contributors. Use status levels and

accumulated points to locate and determine who your best

contributors are. Active community members care deeply

about their status within the community—a fact that most

companies greatly underestimate. The 80/20 rule applies

to communities: 80 percent of the content and participation

will be driven by 20 percent of your employees. By

rewarding and recognizing contributors, you greatly

increase your community’s success.

Our status and reward system is driven by several

variables, including a sophisticated Q&A Workflow feature in discussions and a configurable set of reward points for contributing documents, blogs, and discussion comments.

Your administrator can set the number of points rewarded

for these actions as your organization deems appropriate.

Status levels give members prominence in the community

and help members discern what content is likely to be more useful than others. We recommend structuring your status

levels so that you can easily add new levels as members

accumulate more and more points.

Organizations that have successfully implemented the

reward and status features recommend implementing

additional perks for star contributors. For example:

Publicize Clearspace content using RSS feeds and

email. Make sure employees know about new content posted to Clearspace by including RSS feeds of new blog

posts, discussions, or wiki entries on your organization’s intranet. Email distribution of content is also a very

effective means of viralizing use. Community participants

can respond to email notifications and have the content of those responses posted directly into the appropriate

document comment or discussion thread.

Transition employees to Clearspace gently. Provide

employees the option to navigate and work from something that feels more like Web 1.0—left hand navigation links in Clearspace that show people, projects, and departments

may be appreciated initially. Send emails with links to newly posted content in Clearspace to draw them in and slowly

raise their comfort level with this new way of working.

Make it safe to contribute. Ask management to decrease their visibility so employees aren’t worried that every post they make could cost them their job, or at least their window view. Andrew McAfee suggests that you allow

people to contribute to wikis anonymously, as you might find that some employees are nervous about being open to criticism by their peers and upper management.

Set up a discussion area for feedback. Make sure employees have the opportunity to express what they like and don’t like about using Clearspace, and make sure you respond to them when a response is warranted.

Develop a set of usage guidelines and a corporate

policy for using Clearspace. Part of what makes blogs, forums, and online collaboration succeed in the workplace is an environment of mutual trust and respect laterally,

from top to bottom, and from bottom to top. Typically, a set

of guidelines that says “play nice,” is sufficient, though it may be useful to remind employees that all the policies for

email, print, and other mediums for communication apply

equally to the company blogosphere, online community,

and collaborative document areas. As mentioned earlier,

though, if someone does not play nice, respond quickly and firmly to make sure employees understand that this type of behavior will not be tolerated.

We hope that you’ve learned enough from this document to launch your Clearspace community. At Jive Software, we’ve been using Clearspace to speed up product development,

capture corporate knowledge, and help turn out a solution that marks a major milestone–not just our product offerings, but in how we do business. We hope you’ll experience many of the benefits we know are possible, and we invite you to tell us about your experiences using Clearspace so

that we can constantly improve it. Our community is your

community, and we always have an open door policy for

feedback. Click the Submit Product Feedback link at the bottom of any page in Clearspace to let us know what you think.