SharePoint Online VS. Jive - which is a better collaboration platform?

Having overseen the transition from Jive to Yammer in my company, I have found that the integration is showing increased benefits. I have created (with vendor assistance) some select templates on Sharepoint Online to match the Jive experience. One of the reasons for the move was that every Jive group was unique (which I think is a plus and negative). My colleagues would often complain that it was difficult to find the information they needed quickly due to the differences in group layout. Jive certainly is a competitor for Sharepoint as in general is it more user friendly and reduces the need for "expert" developers. I have tried to avoid the need for Sharepoint developers by providing these standardised templates.
I would say each has its advantages, but I will come down on the side of Sharepoint and Yammer due to the language translation ability and the connections and insights that we have driven from that.

As the others have said SharePoint has broader functionality set than Jive. However for what it does Jive is easier to configure and maintain. If you use Cisco communications tools, Cisco has some integration with Jive that can make it appealing if this is one of the strategic directions of your Business.
Given your Company size I would guess you are using SharePoint Document Management, content collaboration functionality, and workflow functionality. If this is true you many need to focus on what impact Jive would have on your exiting SharePoint eco system and support. The cost to support both and the complexities of integration could outweigh Jives ease of use.
With that Comparing Jive to SharePoint is like comparing a car to a truck. Both will get you from point A to point B one is easier to drive, but both have different uses. Microsoft has positioned Yammer as its social tool. if your company is using or looking at Office 365 you may want to investigate TCO of Jive over Yammer. Yammer, SharePoint, Lync and Exchange work together.
It should not be a question of which is better but rather what are the Business requirements and the business future strategy/direction for use. As with all technology decisions start with Business need. Often department leads start with technology features and build requirement and direction based on product marketing materials. Doing this will jeopardize the long term value of any technology.

As a portal, Jive brings colleagues, content, and current news straight to
your desktop or mobile, and i feel like its more tailored to mobile, where
are Sharepoint deals with the creation websites,communities, content,
search, insights, and composites for collaboration. So if your company is
more mobile oriented I would give Jive a go as its also extremely powerful,
but at a developer standpoint I feel like Sharepoint is a little more
useful. It really just comes down to the company needs.

Adding on to my comments on SharePoint + Yammer... on the Jive side, I feel like Jive provides a more comprehensive mobile solution for communities. If there is a way to pull a Jive newsfeed into an employee portal, that would be massively helpful for some companies but last I heard there was not. If there is already a portal, Jive is more of another destination for employees to go to in order to collaborate. That makes it a miss since it's another step. But overall, Jive offers a lot more than Yammer alone as far as content in a community setting. Where SharePoint can be daunting for some people with so many options and functionality. Jive is super easy for users to learn, as is Yammer. But the functionality of Jive beats Yammer alone for sure. It's tough but really depends on what the company has invested in already. If it's not SharePoint, then Jive would probably be the better option.

It depends on the task. If you've built and employee portal or team site and you want users to collaborate around content on that site, the newsfeed and other social components of SharePoint work great (as long as everyone is on the same farm). Yammer is great for topics and specific content that is kept more locally to Yammer. Both can be accessed via mobile, Yammer works a bit easier on mobile in my opinion. Discussions in SharePoint do not seem to work on Yammer but the newsfeed does. Overall in Office 365, the mobile experience leaves a bit to be desired unless you change the view to 'pc view.' Our teams have not really built mobile friendly versions of O365 sites so that could be part of the problem.

I think that most organizations choose SharePoint because:
1. SharePoint can be integrated with the system.
2. Microsoft support SharePoint.
(No. 1,2 are the most likely reasons even though SharePoint has many problems - speed, limited to work)
3. SharePoint is easy to use like Microsoft office. (easier than Jive)
4. Jive have a software for many services. I think Jive emphasizes software to general social, and do not emphasize it to support organizations.

In conclusion, I think SharePoint is better than Jive now.

Thanks,
Supornpis Singhawat

I've asked this quite a few times, but it really is the core question when you're making any kind of change. What is the objective? What exactly do you want to achieve and what is SharePoint not delivering on? I can tell you about a lot of products (not just SharePoint and Jive), but without context, it would be vague and wouldn't be useful in the grand scheme of things.

I recently moved out of the social collaboration software space, but from
my understanding of the question I actually have a few follow-up questions
for your colleague:
- Will the collaboration be for internal use (coworkers) or for external
use (collaboration among customers or those outside the organization)?
- Is there some sort of Sharepoint Developer in the fold? Is there any
budget put aside?
- Are the end-users familiar with Sharepoint, or would they be brand new to
any platform put in place?

If its for internal use and will link to other MS products, if you have a
developer in the fold, if cost isn't a concern, and your users are familiar
Sharepoint, then by all means go with sharepoint. Its a platform that you
can make into exactly what you are looking for.

Now, if it is a situation where it's an "extranet" or "online community for
customers" of sorts, cost is a concern, and your end users would be new to
a platform either way, then you may want to consider Jive or another social
collaboration provider. Many features in platforms like Jive come out of
the box, such as integration with a database/CRM, reply via email, levels
of administrators, end-user permissions and moderation (certain types of
members can see certain groups/documents), and ease of administration (no
developer needed create new groups). Many of these features would be
costly time and budgetwise to put into place in Sharepoint, where as you
can stand up Jive or another social collaboration/online community provider
in a much shorter timeframe and with less cost and have all the features
you want.

Even internally, many of these tools also can integrate with internal
systems such as Office 365 as well.

All in all, I would weigh what features you absolutely need, and the
time/cost/feasibility of putting those into place in Sharepoint, and see if
Jive or another provider has those already built in and ready to go.

I hope that information is helpful.

Regards,

Kevin

SharePoint - It can definitely do more than Jive and also has lot of
integration capability. In addition it can handle more client request and
can be customized easily to adapt into the clients platform as it is
portable etc., In addition the flexibility to interface with many other
social enterprise software is one of the unique feature of SharePoint.
Cost and other aspects are kind of high as compared to Jive which might be
not a driving factor for the client

Jive: I can say that this product is catching up very much equal to
SharePoint but it is not there yet. The price and other features of the
product is comparatively low and this could be a driving factor for the
client. In addition collaboration / integration to other products within
the client's workspace might be a challenging as the product is not yet
matured to claim all of the similar capability to SharePoint.

I hope the above can give some direction and if required, please feel free
to contact me and can happy to provide further details.

Thanks
Sridhar

Essentially it is best to stick with Sharepoint for obvious reasons. As it
provides seamless integration with other Microsoft products. More so i guess
it can be said that Sharepoint platform is now the benchmark used to
develop intra/extranet services to an organisation. Although there are
several factors that may cause a shift to another platform, cost et all
but what should be looked at is simplicity purpose functionality support
and integration to other environments.

So many times I have been asked why we need Yammer, SharePoint and or any other tool. The answer to this is not straight forward as every tool has it´s strong and weak points.

But how to the main competitors compare?

SharePoint is a strategic platform for corporate IT, which does a solid job at many things (document and content management, basic business workflow, best-in-class collaboration around Office documents and integration to Office servers, robust application development and extension
capabilities, basic social services, and much more). Further, I believe that as time goes by SP will become the core of corporate IT for Windows-centric computing.

On the collaboration side, other tools (especially Jive), are much sharper and well-defined than SharePoint, specially as it refers to browser-based collaboration. That advantage shows up as better implemented activity streams, better social interaction (discussions and blogs - not wikis), simple mechanisms for people association, and such.

So how do they compare with each other but in my opinion neither SharePoint 2010 nor 2013 compare at all to Jive on its own. SharePoints microblogging functionality is very poor. It is a one and done sort of thing where you could not reply to a thread It also required a lot more technical expertise to make it usable whereas Jive adds value right out of the shrink-wrap. We are planning on using the SP connector at some point, but right now focused on our Jive internal launch and we'll work on that in the next phase. The IT support requires continual programming and infrastructure efforts to support applications (which is most of the time forbidden by digit), while the Jive almost needs more IT support.

On the long term Jive doesn't do 75% of what SharePoint does as a long-term IT platform, or even more. But what Jive does way better eg (browser-based collaboration) it does 75% better than SharePoint. That advantage shows up as better implemented activity streams, better social interaction (discussions and blogs - not wikis), simple mechanisms for people association, and such.

Most companies make the error and define their needs based on the “old school” Share Drive approach that SharePoint offers moving their Share Drives to SharePoint. SharePoint is more for a hierarchical firm while Jive is more for a network centric firm. If a company wants to break the silos I`d advice them to use Jive as knowledge sharing platform and SharePoint as document library, to get the best out of two worlds.

Both do their jobs well in what they are made for, in the end the decision lies in the definition of your needs.

Only my humble opinion, before Jive I also voted for the move to SharePoint, but since then a lot has changed….for me everything has changed.

Kind regards

Peter