Likelihood to Recommend Well suited to tracking aid needed and provided to people; to developing a plan for helping - a roadmap. We use it to also identify which volunteers can help on various projects, to try to leverage volunteer experiences and linking to specific client needs.
Read full review The platform is an excellent solution for companies looking for a workflow automation system that can be used across departments and its return on investment becomes apparent once it is introduced in production for a business. Its ability to route work tasks dynamically between employees and outside parties, implement SLAs, and get information to a back-end source is excellent.
Read full review Pros Apricot by Social Solutions does a great job of making database administration simple and effective. It is easy for someone in the non-profit sector without much prior experience in similar programs to work on the back end of Apricot by Social Solutions building forms and doing reporting. Apricot by Social Solutions is a generally user-friendly program that our staff of many different ages and abilities are able to utilize effectively. The buildability of the program is a major plus for our organization, allowing us to cater Apricot by Social Solutions with exactly what we need for our programming and services. Read full review Ease of use. The drag and drop configuration to create the processes makes the product easy to use and configure. Most of the icons are intuitive on what they are and how to use them. The use of the colored icons for each value also helps to know that that value is looking for. Forms. The capture forms are easy to create and maintain. A new field can be added to the Extraction group and then the capture form is regenerated and that field is automatically added to the form with all the proper attributes. If an additional check box or field is added to the form, that field stays when regenerated. This differs from KTA 6.0. Kofax has done pretty well integrating all the pieces of Kofax into one product. KC (Kofax Capture), KIC (Kofax Import Connector), KTM (Kofax Transformation Module with OCR), and workflow are all combined into KTA (Kofax Total Agility). This lets all of these features work together in one product. Kofax does keep adding more to the functions that maybe were left out original version. This makes Kofax Total Agility a robust product. Read full review Cons Almost every year I get a new customer care support person, and it can be hard to reorient each new person to my unique business case and use of Apricot by Social Solutions In the past, I have had issues with communication from different departments in Apricot by Social Solutions about what I was getting as part of my contract. In my experience, when I had my initial meeting to kick off upgrading our Apricot by Social Solutions instance, the majority of the information the project consultant had was incorrect. I had to send an email to someone else to rectify the situation. If Apricot by Social Solutions was compatible with phones that would be really helpful. I wish the font size and formatting were more customizable when building out forms in Apricot by Social Solutions (e.g., more similar to how customizable Surveymonkey is with different surveys). Read full review Exception management within the platform can certainly be improved upon. If a job is suspended for any particular issue integrations can be put in place to attempt to handle them but it is kludgy and does not always work as anticipated. The administration interface is based on Microsoft Silverlight which limits it to certain versions of Internet Explorer and the interface has seen better days. Their other application, Kofax Kapow, has a much more mature and intuitive interface. This supposedly is being replaced in the next major iteration but I have doubts it will be successfully done. The product is expensive. It is also the Cadillac of workflow platforms with document transformation built in. In many cases the product can do what you want it to do but there may be other more cost effective platforms. Read full review Likelihood to Renew I went to the Summit a few weeks ago to learn about the future expansion and vision of Social Solutions. I already been with Apricot for 5 years and researched other products I still come back to Apricot and where it can grow with us.
Read full review Usability Without any formal IT education, I was able to utilize their articles and videos to teach myself how to configure and customize the software to our organization (although I do recommend their Apricot Admin training to polish your skills). The majority of users are able to adapt immediately with minimal training.Staff that have challenges with technology in general do adapt to using the system once you can create buy in and engagement (although it does take time and training)
Read full review Reliability and Availability It is usually available when I need to use it
Read full review Performance The system does tend to run slowly when pulling more complex reports
Read full review Support Rating This is a difficult question to answer because when I hear the word "support" I think of this in multiple levels. The customer service on the front end, with my account manager is pretty good. There was a time for about a year and a half where I didn't even want to get to know this persons name because they wouldn't be there there long enough for me to get to know them. For the past 8-9 months we've had the same account manager, and this is helpful as a way to grow our trust in Apricot social solutions as well as the account manager understanding the needs of our organization. The technical support is also fine. The issues we most have problems with is how the technical support is calculated and the lack of roll-over of technical support time. If our account has 1 hour of technical support per month, but we don't need any technical support for 4 months, it would be great to have the ability to use those 4 hours (as time allows per the IT calendar) when we need them, even if it falls within one month. We've also had instances of working with IT persons who didn't seem to care at all about our issues, and seemed eager to put our call behind them and get onto the next without much thought as to why we were calling them in the first place. We've also had instances where the IT person didn't seem to really be listening to what it is we needed, and was heck bent on what they THOUGHT we needed rather than listening to what we actually did need. While we also have had experiences of working with IT persons who were absolutely great at working through issues. They were patient and understanding and would explain why a solution (c)would or (c)would not work. We even worked through those options in real time if they were unsure whether a data solution would work or not. That was great because we felt heard.
Read full review In-Person Training Online training only
Read full review Online Training There are good training guides.
Read full review Implementation Rating There need to be specialists who know how to best work with an organization developing a new program, not just transferring existing forms to a digital format.
Read full review Alternatives Considered The ability to customize Apricot and the simple interface is incredibly appealing.
Salesforce CMS may be more well known, and cheaper for nonprofits, but it's also seen as the "Cadillac" version and is overwhelming for many small to mid sized organizations. The build out can be expensive as well, although there is a more general knowledge about the product and integration options.
Read full review Kofax TotalAgility is a beast of a package that gives you a thousand ways to tackle a problem, but it may not be the best platform for your needs. It is more of an enterprise platform that integrates well with other systems with moderate development time. Other packages may be cheaper, easier, and faster to implement depending on needs.
Read full review Scalability This software doesn't work well for our organization
Read full review Return on Investment Our data reporting capability. We're able to do the most robust reporting we've ever done. Was able to handle our rapid expansion (doubling program in 1 fiscal year). We did have a loss of data near the beginning of our use of the system and never got a clear answer why it happened. Data was never recovered. The cost to add additional users is really high, and there aren't many options to bundle or review user licenses to ensure we're getting the best deal. Read full review Kofax TotalAgility is very expensive. Some customers have reported that using the KTA workflow has increased productivity and has a good ROI overall. The customers have not shared true numbers for me to give details. Read full review ScreenShots Bonterra Case Management Screenshots