Jive Software makes cloud-based social enterprise software that’s steering itself further in the right direction thanks to a few new features that add integration and analytics on top of the existing product.

This week Jive announced the availability of Try Jive, a one-month trial of its flagship offering, complete with the update features.  These additions are fairly extensive, to the extent that almost all of them justified a unique name.

The first one is Jive Anywhere, which connects the websites employees typically visit (SasSalesforce.com, Office 365, etc) and extends the platform’s collaborative capabilities to include the web app that’s being accessed at a given time. The reversed version is App Experiences, another tool that instead makes it easier to use third party BI applications from within Jive.

In addition the social cloud’s activity stream received a facelift – the interface has been modified to mimic the simplicity of Facebook, at the same time filtering has been added. The latter is the focus of Jive Edge, which is probably the most significant part of this update.

Edge is a big data engine based on technology the company obtained as a part of the Proximal Labs acquisition last year. It aggregates workers’ social activity and analyzes it in a way that facilitates an advanced search function, also with its own unique name, to contextualize it all in a readable format.

“Social business is no longer for early adopters only,” said Nikos Drakos, Research Director at Gartner. “It is becoming a mainstream phenomenon, and the market is evolving rapidly. This calls for powerful solutions that solve real business problems and provide an effortless collaboration experience by merging seamlessly into everyday workflows.”

Another area where Jive is adopting yet another emerging trend in IT is gamification.