Likelihood to Recommend Specific scenarios where Communifire would be well suited to an organisation, would be companies that are people focused and committed to frequent and open communication channels from both the top-down and bottom-up. It also would suit organizations that are committed to providing the staff opportunities to collaborate, share and actively contribute to company initiatives and planning. If these aren't elements of your organization's culture, the system would still work for you or those companies who just want to push information out and have an effective intranet. Communifire would cater to these scenarios just as well and is more than capable of providing that type of simple solution.
Read full review I think Micro Focus Vibe is very well suited for organizations that work in a team collaboration front and have to share documents. I think this really shines in organizations that have a standard set of information that gets lost in the sauce because of the sheer amount of people in an organization. In this case, the Wiki is very helpful in this setting. I wouldn't quite recommend this site for video production houses unless you are patient enough to correlate your needs to the many many features available through Vibe...because it all boils down to patience.
Read full review Pros Communifire allows people to connect easily through instant chat and messaging. It works similarly to other social media platforms like Facebook so its not hard to learn. Communifire makes it easy to share news and events with our community and the presentation of this information looks very professional. I found Communifire quite easy to configure to our individual needs. There were a lot of options to turn things on or off. This was important to us because in some areas of our community we wanted to allow our contractors many features and in other areas we wanted to really limit what was on offer. We had a big list of things we needed a platform to do. Communifire ticked all the boxes. Read full review Novell Vibe connects GroupWise mail with Vibe natively which means you can access Vibe from within the mail product. Once forms and workflows are set up, the access structure on who sees what or not is very effective. You can use Novell Vibe as your main intranet with everything from wiki's, blogging and more fully automated and still in synch with your internal organisational structure. After playing with it for a while i found that through jsp it is highly configurable. Read full review Cons Some UX issues that could be improved Some architecture decisions don't make complete sense to me (though that's just one man's opinion) Read full review The most pressing improvement is in printing. In speaking with Novell techs Vibe was designed as a web tool, no paper necessary. However in the real world our folks love their paper printouts. Vibe utilizes views for various functions. A print view that's easily configured would be an awesome upgrade. Customized in JSP. Vibe is completely customized using JSP. I don't know it. I'm not a programmer. I can work things out, but programming isn't my forte. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Our business depends upon this software to provide information on all aspects of our business. The future of business is a marriage between web site and customer interaction. This software will allow us to move in that direction.
Read full review It meets our current business needs and provides the scalability we need for future growth. It can be installed on Windows or Linux (Our alpha install was on Linux. Our beta was on Windows. We went with Windows). There are additional features, and application integrations, that we haven't taken advantage as of yet due to the lack of current business needs.
Read full review Usability This rating has a caveat - there is always room for improvement, and this team gets it. You always learn from customers how to do things better and easier, so it is a constant learning of how people use the site. Although the search engine is exceptional, most people do not use it as their first line of research. Much of the usability has to do with layout - and is not just a software usability item, so the rating is severely dependent up on the layout/options you choose for your usage. And their team will do anything in their power to get the results and layout you want. The areas that need improvement - and acknowledged by the team - are the administrative tools. There are a ton of options, and it takes a little to learn some of those. For most people, however, this won't be an issue, because the support team will always help you. This is always the case with more power. If there were fewer options it would no doubt be easier, but they give you the keys to all of the cars in the lot; so a little more to learn.
Read full review At this moment it still looks you need to do a lot to be able to use it and to be honest that time should be used for work not for configuring a communication tool for the business. Yes I understand that it takes time to learn something to use in the organisation , but with this tool I see the help desk having to answer a lot of questions on how to use it or once someone has done something how to undo it.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Never any problems. Quite impressed
Read full review Performance Works in real time.
Read full review Support Rating I have always found Communifire support to be exceptional. We have had a personal account manager who has been very helpful.
Read full review Implementation Rating I found the system to be very flexible and the Communifire team very supportive in helping me identify solutions for my goals.
Read full review The implementation was good, it is the follow up that we need to do ourselves that takes time and effort.
Read full review Alternatives Considered We selected Communifire for the excellent sales support, strong feature set and quick set up time. We were able to get started immediately and build out features as need required which led to faster execution and higher adoption rates among our team.
Read full review The main alternatives were Sharepoint or creating a custom Drupal install. Sharepoint was too expensive and didn't fit into our Novell environment. The Drupal solution we found was beyond our technical ability.
Jason Preuss Web Development Specialist/Senior Research Analyst
Read full review Return on Investment We are still building out features of the platform but with implemention of paid features by members, we will be able to cover our operating cost of the platform. Read full review Novell Vibe has increased employee efficiency by providing a central file repository for our team. Novell Vibe has increased our customer service capabilities by allowing our team to track customer projects and support issues more effectively. Read full review ScreenShots