I was in New York City today, and get a demo from some folks at Jive of some of the new capabilities of the Fall release. In particular I had read about the close integration of Producteev — the task management tool acquired early last year — into Jive’s mainstream product offering.

The integration is a specific instance of a general model that Jive has developed, which allows third party applications to become first-class objects within the Jive application framework. In this way, Producteev can present itself as a top level navigation within Jive, and when that is clicked, the user’s Producteev information is shown more ot less as it would be in Producteev. That I consider a fairly loose integration. But they’ve gone past that, so that individual tasks — defined or created within Producteev projects — can be posted in the activity stream of Jive, or embedded in posts or comment threads. Here’s the Task object showing up on the ubiquitous ‘create’ panel:

Here’s tasks showing up in a Jive activity stream:

And here embedded in a document:

Similarly, Producteev tasks can be access within Outlook and Gmail with the company’s integrations with those email systems.

The Jive + Producteev beta is available with every cloud instance of Jive, so there is no need to do much to get it up and running, just configuration. Since Producteev is only a cloud solution, this won’t integrate with on-premise Jive, and there is no expectation it ever will.

This isn’t really a review, so I have no bottom line to offer, per se. However, I think the Producteev integration is a no-brainer for any existing or future users of Jive, and clearly, it will be a large factor in evaluation by new clients, making it even more of an attractive work management solution.