Add WebWorks support for Jive SBS
Summary
Add a new WebWorks output format for Jive social business software (SBS) 4.0 or above
Detailed Description
We are planning to migrate a large docset (approximately 5,000 pages) to a Docs Portal on some platform that supports user comments, collaborative editing, ranking of topics and user contributions, etc. We are considering both Confluence wiki and Jive social business software as potential platforms, and researching both. Jive (http://www.jivesoftware.com/) is our preference because other groups in the company are also migrating documents and solutions share sites to Jive, and so integrating Docs into this system would be much easier. If we could deploy our Doc Portal on the same platform, this would be good; a seamless experience for customers and much easier maintenance for us (not having to integrate to disparate systems. And we could take advantage of many Jive features that would not otherwise be available. Full WebWorks output support for Jive would be very useful to us. In the meantime, we are already in discussion with Jive engineers and professional services to do custom imports for us of WebWorks generated HTML based on the Dynamic HTML template.
Use Cases
The main use case is that described above. We want to use WebWorks ePublisher and automap + our custom autoubuild system to produce and maintain a collaborative Docs Portal on Jive. We want the Docs Portal to integrate seamlessly with other sites also hosted on Jive. Various groups here (professional services, customer support, development, Docs team, have vetted several different community software platforms, and settle on Jive as the best solution. Jive (http://www.jivesoftware.com/) is a leading provider of Web 2.0 style social media and community platforms for business, and their product roadmap and integrations with other Web 2.0 software is unparalleled based on our recent evaluations.
Feedback from Jive
We met with the Jive Field Sales and Professional Services reps on Wednesday, and described the project we want to do to them. They can do an import of HTML onto a Jive platform, but we will need to engage there Professional Services to do a custom implementation in order to get the cohesion we need for the docsets; i.e., to maintain next/previous links and x-refs in general, and to get ability to comment on a per-page basis. It sounds do-able but won't be as clean, integrated or as efficient to produce than If WebWorks provided a Jive-specific output, much like you all do for Confluence. Here is an example of a straight HTML import done on Jive (output looks like it could be WebWorks generated DHTML): http://community.zenoss.org/docs/DOC-4504
I think some of the issues are that a Jive-specific WebWorks output would better handle the relationship between the HTML pages, retain the links between them, and clarify the "location" and naming of the pages on the server. It would look better integrated into the Jive platform for display purposes, and probably be an easier process to repeat as we upload new versions.
If you all are considering supporting a Jive output format, we would love to work with you as a Beta customer, We are very motivated right now to move our documentation to the Jive platform (because several other ArcSight departments plant to publish on Jive including Customer Support, Professional Services, Training, etc.), and we want to integrate our Docs with those sites. If you all were interested, this could be a good WebWorks testing scenario and reference implementation on Jive. We'd be happy to work closely on it, and help w/trial-and-error, features, and testing of deploying the output files.
Let me know what your thoughts are on this. We believe that WebWorks support for Jive would be a win/win for everyone. Jive is fast becoming the leader in community platform hosting, and might have some compelling partnerships with other leaders like Google in the works. We plan to meet with Jive folks in a couple of weeks, and will report status to management this afternoon.