Jive has introduced Social Media Engagement, which enables companies to monitor and respond in real time to conversations taking place on social sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Jive claims users can now act faster than ever before in response to online discussions about products, services and brands to strengthen customer relationships, nurture brand champions and capture innovative ideas.

The new release includes Facebook fan page monitoring and engagement, in which companies can monitor, track and respond to every conversation on a Facebook fan page without having to set up a search for specific key words.

Further, Jive Social Media Engagement provides unlimited keyword tracking and search results, making it cost-effective to monitor and engage across the social Web. Jive is also introducing new packaging and licensing for social media monitoring and engagement. The company now offers both a stand-alone social media engagement solution along with the option to integrate Jive Social Media Engagement with its broader Jive Engage Platform for an unlimited number of users.

Janney Montegomery Scott, a financial services firm and subsidiary of The Penn Mutual Life Insurance Company, has increased its website traffic by 10 to 20 percent and improved its search engine rankings with a new site powered by iAPPS Content Manager and iAPPS Analytics from Bridgeline Digital.

Janney realized that its customers were relying on the Web more and more for access to their accounts and for timely information. Consequently, the financial services firm engaged Bridgeline to redevelop the site to better reflect its brand identity and content requirements, and to provide a more effective gateway to its business lines and secure information.

The new site connects users with the information they need, strengthens the Janney brand and enhances the user experience, Bridgeline reports in a recent press release. With iAPPS Content Manager, Janney can deliver up-to-date, brand-sensitive content in real time. It also allows Janney's non-technical site administrators to create, manage and edit site content within an easy-to-use interface. iAPPS Analytics provides important intelligence on site visitor behavior and path and scenario analysis, according to Bridgeline.

Active Endpoints has released ActiveVOS V. 8.0. Reported highlights include support for Business Process Management Notation (BPMN) "swim lanes" and support for BPMN 2.0 boundary events, new data access integration capabilities, improved deployment management and expanded task management.

The company claims the combination of these new capabilities improves the ability for all stakeholders—project managers, application architects, solutions architects and developers—to utilize ActiveVOS for designing, developing and deploying mission-critical, custom process applications even more effectively. The latest version offers designers new capabilities to convey the functions and desired behavior of a custom process application.

Among the new tools designers can use:

• BPMN’s concept of pool and lanes makes it easy for process designers to convey the process steps being carried out by each participant (which can be an automated service or human tasks) of the process being automated.
• BPMN 2.0 boundary events provide process automation designers with graphical annotations to directly specify the interrupting and non-interrupting execution behavior following the arrival of message, timer, error and compensation events.
• Unstructured process design capabilities, in combination with ActiveVOS’ structured design features, enable layout freedom while designing process automation activities.
• A data access service provides direct access to data sources.
• Improved deployment management enhances the ability of development teams to incrementally build and deploy versions of a process automation application and minimize the risk of introducing incompatibilities at runtime.
• Custom task properties allow process automation teams to define task search filters and task grouping in user interfaces.
• Single sign-on (SSO) allows deployment of ActiveVOS process automation applications using an organization’s existing SSO environment.

Clearwell Systems has released its Identification and Collection Module. Available as part of Version 6.0 of the Clearwell E–Discovery Platform, the new module enables IT teams to easily identify and collect electronically stored information (ESI) while maintaining data integrity and chain of custody. The company explains the data can then seamlessly be made available to legal teams for early case assessment (ECA), review and production.

For example, IT can easily target collections from critical data sources including applications in the cloud, then filter and deliver collected content internally with minimal administrative overhead. Legal teams can log in and immediately begin to analyze and review collected data in the same seamless interface. Additionally, because IT and legal teams can collaborate and streamline their interactions using one unified application, they are able to view the real–time status of the entire case—from identification through production—in a single, comprehensive report.

eGain has launched a new version of its Social Experience Suite, a solution engineered to empower contact center agents and community managers to efficiently handle inquiries across all traditional and social channels. The new version includes a social-blended agent desktop, integration with Facebook to complement already available integrations with Twitter and Web search, as well as a single-sourced knowledge publishing capability for proactive social engagement.

The Gain Social Experience Suite consists of three offerings:

eGain Social enables businesses to listen to conversations on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter for customer queries, analyze and route them intelligently and post a response. The solution also includes analytics and the ability to move a potentially explosive social conversation to a more private interaction channel for discreet one-on-one resolution.

The social-blended agent desktop combines queries from Facebook, Twitter, forums and blogs with those from traditional customer service channels such as phone, e-mail, SMS chat and co-browse. This enables agents to get a complete view of the customer, context and knowledge for efficient handling of queries. The solution also includes capabilities for full-cycle knowledge harvesting, single-sourced knowledge publishing across social and traditional channels and reputation management.

eGain Community allows companies to include forums as part of their customer interaction hubs. eGain says forums are especially useful for fostering discussions among expert users. Forum posts can be federated into knowledgebase searches, and useful posts can be harvested for inclusion in the multichannel knowledgebase maintained by the business.

eGain Social Adapters make it possible for eGain to monitor social networks through integrations with Facebook, Twitter, Google and Yahoo search.

IBM has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Netezza, a developer of analytics software based in Massachusetts, at a price of $27 per share or approximately $1.7 billion after adjusting for cash. IBM will utilize Netezza to expand its business analytics initiatives and allow clients faster interpretation of business data at a lower cost. The acquisition, subject to Netezza shareholder approval, is expected to close in 4Q 2010.

More than 350 clients in a variety of different industries have adopted Netezza technology, including eHarmony, Time Warner, and Nationwide Insurance. The agreement with Netezza is the latest in a string of 23 analytics-related acquisitions for IBM over the past 4 years.

(www.ibm.com; www.netezza.com)

Sophia, a provider of enterprise search products and software, announced Sophia Search, a new search service which makes use of a semiotic-based model called the Contextual Discovery Engine to identify intrinsic terms in unstructured content in order to make it easier to recover and consolidate. Through this service, Sophia reports that organizations will be able to minimize compliance risk and reduce the cost of storing and organizing enterprise information.

Some specific features of Sophia Search include its ability to detect duplicate and near-duplicate information in addition to providing customers with contextual data to help optimize their information landscape. Sophia Search is available now to customers and partners, with pricing starting at $50,000.

Read more about this product launch on the Econtent Blog.

(www.sophiasearch.com)

Content Analyst, a provider of advanced analytics and conceptual search for the document management, legal and intelligence communities, has released CAAT V. 3.8, its document analytics software.

The company reports that CAAT V. 3.8 adds e-mail threading to the set of CAAT features aimed at e-mail discovery and analysis. Previous releases include automated repeated content identification and filters, e-mail header filters, "deNISTing" and similar document detection (also called conceptual near-dup). For threading, CAAT identifies the relationships among a family of e-mails based on their content and associated metadata. CAAT e-mail threading also identifies duplicate sets, inclusive sets, extracts and normalizes metadata, identifies missing e-mail and determines order within a conversation.