Last week, Jive Software made what's probably our biggest product launch ever. Clearspace is a team collaboration tool that includes discussions, blogging, and wiki documents along with social features like tagging. Unlike Wildfire and Spark, Clearspace is commercial (developer source) software. That follows our pragmatic hybrid Open Source model. That said, Igniterealtime is an Open Source community, so why am I blogging about Clearspace here?

  !http://www.igniterealtime.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/02/clearspace_small.p ng! First, Clearspace demonstrates how we're approaching collaboration strategically. We want to make team collaboration fundamentally more efficient, easier to use, and more fun. Most of you are pretty familiar with how we're striving towards those goals on the real-time side with Wildfire and Spark. Clearspace is another piece of the puzzle. One example: instead of sending multiple versions of a document through email that get lost in the netherworld of email hell, why not track the document versions in a central place that also seamlessly manages real-time and non-real time discussion around that document? Many of the Open Source features we'll be building into Wildfire and Spark over the next year fit into solving that type of business problem. We'll also be integrating lots of real-time functionality directly into Clearspace.

Second, we've updated the pricing model for the Wildfire Enterprise plugin to better match  Clearspace pricing. Enterprise is now $15 per user/year, which includes support and all upgrades. It's much simpler than the old model, which included a server license cost and a separate support and maintenance fee. For full details on pricing and support terms, visit the Jive Software pricing page, which includes info on special bundled pricing of Clearspace and Wildfire Enterprise.

I'm really excited about everything we're building -- from wiki documents and blogging to presence and VoIP. We're sending a shot across the bow of mammoth companies like Microsoft. There's a better way to do collaboration that's lighter-weight and more user-friendly. Mix in open standards, open systems, and a liberal dose of Open Source and we think we have a compelling alternative. We hope to get as much feedback on Clearspace as possible, so we'd love to hear from you if you have a chance to check it out.