Jive Software has eliminated the limit on the number of people who can use its social task management application Producteev for free within a company.
It also added new features to the application, including the capability of assigning tasks to everyone in the company, not just to narrower sets of employees involved in a specific project.
"Now you can scale Producteev across large companies and have your entire network [of employees] all taking advantage of it," said Nathan Rawlins, Jive's vice president of product marketing.
Producteev strikes a balance between to-do applications aimed at individuals and heavy-duty, complex project management software designed for project leaders, according to Rawlins.
"It gives you the ease of task lists and the ability to share and collaborate on tasks like project management tools," he said.
The company, which acquired Producteev late last year, plans to release a premium fee-based version of the application later this year that will be deeply integrated with Jive's flagship enterprise social networking (ESN) software suite.
In the meantime, Jive is counting on Producteev to act as an entry point to new customers, Rawlins said. "We expect that as companies use Producteev and become more productive with task management, that they'll then look to Jive for other ways to be more productive, including with social collaboration and communications."
Currently, there is a Producteev application that can be installed in Jive's platform that lets users turn a discussion thread from Jive into a Producteev task item.
However, the tighter integration between Jive and Producteev due later this year will deliver the goal of the acquisition -- to complement fully with task management the ESN features of Jive, like employee profiles, activity streams, microblogging, discussion forums, commenting and the like.
