Jive announced yesterday that they acquired offisync. Offisync make the integration with Microsoft Windows, Outlook, and Office as seamless as possible. That’s a pretty strong move considering one of their competitors Teligent already has very strong Microsoft integration. I like the last part of the quote I pulled from their site the best, “Together, Jive and OffiSync change the focus of Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint from personal productivity to group collaboration.” I think that hits the power of social collaboration. It also takes the focus from the document to the people who actually work with the document.
What are the benefits of the OffiSync acquisition to Jive’s customers?
With the OffiSync acquisition, Jive makes it even easier for enterprise users to benefit from its market-leading Social Business platform:
- Users can take advantage of Jive’s social content, collaboration and conversation capabilities, all without leaving the user interface to which they’ve become accustomed;
- Users no longer have to choose between the superior collaboration capabilities inherent to Jive’s social business platform or the familiar Microsoft Office user interface;
- Users can use their preferred tools from Microsoft to create content, while sharing, annotating and collaborating on the resulting documents using Jive’s advanced social capabilities – all without leaving their familiar user interface;
- Users can address the fundamental issue of e-mail overload. Instead of hitting “reply all” from the Outlook interface, users can turn important conversations into a discussion on the Jive platform. Users can also view and reply to the discussion on the Jive platform from their inbox;
- Users can now view Outlook contacts with context from the social web, including information from Jive, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
Together, Jive and OffiSync change the focus of Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint from personal productivity to group collaboration.
