Clearspace Best Practices by dwjmccall

Revolutionalize the Way You Work Together “Clearspace brings Web 2.0 to the Enterprise”

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.

Table of Contents Important Shifts in the Web................................................1 Clearspace—Jive Software’s Response to Web 2.0..........1 Setting up a space in Clearspace........................................2 Content within a Space........................................................5 Content Type: Blogs...............................................................5 Content Type: Discussions.....................................................6 Content Type: Collaborative Documents................................7 Content Type: Profiles............................................................8

Permissions.........................................................................8 Understanding the User Types...............................................8 Selecting Permissions to Assign to Users and Groups..........9 Leverage Existing User Authentication Systems....................9

Content Moderation...........................................................10 Other Clearspace Features...............................................10 RSS Feeds and Email Notifications.....................................10

How to Successfully Launch Clearspace..........................12 Getting Executive Buy-in......................................................12 Encouraging Participation....................................................12 In Closing.............................................................................13

Important Shifts in the Web 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Instant messaging and online presence that allow you to communicate immediately with someone because you can see that they are online. •

Clearspace—Jive Software’s Response to Web 2.0 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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Setting up a space in Clearspace 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) • Trade Shows (tag group) • Collateral (tag group) • Presentations (tag group)

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Sales (space) Channel Sales (sub-space) • Value-added Resellers (tag group) • Distribution (tag group)

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Business Development (sub-space) • OEM (tag group) • Strategic Partnerships (tag group)

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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 subspace 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:

Product Management (sub-space) • Product A (tag group) • Product B (tag group)

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• Retirement (sub-space) – 401K Plans (tag group) – Pensions (tag group) • Health Care (sub-space) – PPO (tag group) – HMO (tag group)

Direct Sales (sub-space) • Eastern Region (sub-space) • Western Region (sub-space)

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.

Human Resources (space) •

Benefits (sub-space)

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Tagging Best Practices and the Importance of Tagging in Clearspace 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.

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Content within a Space 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.

Blogs, Discussions and Documents: Making the Most of the Differences 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 • Use – State an opinion, describe a solution, point to something interesting, ponder an idea. • Shape – Top heavy, with a longer initial message. Similar to a magazine article. Small number of comments.

Content Type: Blogs 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.

Blogs Versus Discussion 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.

• Shape – Bottom heavy, with a shorter initial message. A larger number of replies and comments.

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.

• Language – Informal, first person.

Using Blogs in Business

• Parent/Container in Clearspace – A space.

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:

• Language – Informal, first person. • Parent/Container in Clearspace – A personal or group blog (independent of an individual space)

Discussion • Use – Get feedback, report a problem, find a solution to a problem.

Wiki Document • Use – Codify existing knowledge, document processes, create reports, best practices, and meeting notes.

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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.

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To foster innovation for the company through input from customers passionate about that company’s products or services.

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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.

• Shape – Top heavy, with a longer initial message. • Language – Formal, third person. • Parent/Container in Clearspace – A space.

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.

Blogging Best Practices 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, tshirts, or even coupons for a product discount.

Content Type: Discussions

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.

Discussions Best Practices 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

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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.

Content Type: Collaborative Documents

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.

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Workflow with Documents in Clearspace 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.

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.

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.

Content Type: Profiles

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.

Profile Best Practices

Documents Best Practices 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

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.

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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.

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.

Selecting Permissions to Assign to Users and Groups

Clearspace provides the following capabilities for users and groups. You can assign all or any of these permissions to your users and groups:

Permissions

• View a space

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.

• Read comments

Understanding the User Types

• Vote in polls

• Read documents

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

• Rate messages • Rate documents • Create discussion threads • Create messages • Create message attachments • Create documents • Create comments • Create polls • Create announcements How Jive Clearspace Applies Permissions Clearspace 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

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permissions that the user belongs to. After applying those “user” permissions, it applies content permissions at the following levels: •

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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 spacelevel 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.

Leverage Existing User Authentication Systems 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.

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Content Moderation 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.

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Treat others with respect.

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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.

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.

Other Clearspace Features 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.

RSS Feeds and Email Notifications

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.

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 Jive Software, 317 SW Alder St, Ste 500, Portland, OR 97204 www.jivesoftware.com

RSS and Email Notifications Best Practices 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.

Themes 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 Feature 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.

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 (Accessing Clearspace content via a “classic” file structure) 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.

Email Response 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 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.

Announcements 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.

Web Services Use Web Services capability in Clearspace to integrate existing applications with Clearspace. Clearspace includes a number of Web service-enabled objects. The SOAPbased Web Services provided in Clearspace provides the ability to easily enable space functionality and Jive Software, 317 SW Alder St, Ste 500, Portland, OR 97204 www.jivesoftware.com

How to Successfully Launch Clearspace 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.

Getting Executive Buy-in

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: • Measuring how long it takes to complete similar projects before Clearspace and after. • Tracking the number of posts to blogs, discussions, and collaborative documents. • Tracking the reduction in email volume. 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.

Encouraging Participation

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

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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: • Spotlight them or their content on the main page. • Highlight their contributions in a company newsletter. • Reward them on a monthly or quarterly basis with t-shirts or an iPod. • Make attainment of a status level part of employee’s objectives and bonus structure. 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.

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.

In Closing

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.

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.

Jive Software, 317 SW Alder St, Ste 500, Portland, OR 97204 www.jivesoftware.com