Jive integrates with Google, Facebook, Twitter

An early entrant in the enterprise social network market, Jive Software is broadening its offerings and integrating them with a bevy of other social networks and applications.

In other words, Jive never wants you to leave.

Jive’s social stream can already pull in documents from SharePoint and Box, but the company’s fall release — previewed at JiveWorld13 this Wednesday and scheduled to arrive early November — will also integrate with Google Drive, Gmail, Twitter, and Facebook.

You’ll be able to preview and edit Google Drive docs without leaving Jive, and initiate Jive conversations via Gmail. Jive’s activity feed can also display Facebook and Twitter updates.

But that’s just scratching the surface, said Nathan Rawlins, Jive’s vice president of product marketing.

“We’re giving developers direct access to the tools we use to create the out of the box integrations so they can create those systems as well,” Rawlins told VentureBeat earlier this week.

That means developers can connect Jive with services like Dropbox and Evernote, or even competing enterprise social networks like Yammer and Chatter.

“It’s also bidirectional,” he said. “If I comment on Chatter, it gets sent back out to that system.”

The integrations with external services are simpler thanks to Jive’s recent partnership with Okta, an enterprise identity management service. Announced last week, the partnership allows Jive customers to install Okta Cloud Connect at no additional cost, which means they don’t have to tamper with firewalls to connect Jive with Microsoft Active Directory and other corporate LDAP (lightweight directory access protocol) directories.

“We’re introducing a huge slew of capabilities that make it easier to work… that don’t exist in other enterprise social networks,” said Rawlins. “We expect Jive to continue to drive significant productivity gains within our customer base.”

On Wednesday, Jive also unveiled the revamped version of its customer community platform, JiveX. Scheduled to launch in early 2014, the cloud-based version of JiveX features integration with Salesforce for case management and Marketo for marketing automation.