It's rare that I get to write a post for this newsletter that might appeal to both the ITEC community as well as the people interested in New Marketing Summit, but this story has both. Oregon-based Jive Software has announced Clearspace 2.5, and CMO Sam Lawrence spoke with me on Monday to give me the scoop.

Clearspace comes in two flavors: internally, it's an enterprise collaboration platform. Externally, it's a community platform (we use Clearspace 2.0.x for our Project Dogfood software at present). What's interesting to you as an enterprise customer is that this new version of Clearspace integrates to Salesforce.com (or several other CRM platforms) and it gives a sales team (or marketing, or whoever else has contact with external customers, prospects, partners, etc) an opportunity for a more integrated view.

Further, Clearspace has several other enterprise-friendly features in 2.5, including for much more customization to match the look, feel, and nomenclature of your organization. It also has easier-to-use tools for your less-tech-savvy adopters, and email-friendly tools for your mobile-but-not-mobile-browser types. There are CRM integrations, project status integrations, and much more.

You can see more about this at Jive's site, or you can meet them in person at New Marketing Summit. In either case, what's interesting about this release to me as a technologist is that it shows one model for how enterprise social software integration might look. What's your take? Email me back at : [email protected] to talk more about it.