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 it is well-suited for populations who value social media and being connected in this manner at work. If the population does not value this type of open interaction, it will be underutilized. Many of our baby-boomer generation staff have a hard time seeing the relevancy of a site such as this.
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 I think it helps people crowd source an organization for information and resources that may not be easily found. The subjects feature is a great place to develop communities of practice where links, files and communication can be shared. As long as the search engine is optimized / working effectively, it can be a powerful way to access sites and resources across the organization. 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 profile finder is glitchy and rarely comes up with solid results. The site sometimes has glitches, such as subject pages not loading and complete content not appearing on the screen until you refresh or give it an abnormal amount of time to load. The "USAID Search" option should appear first for the search results. It is not intuitive that it is the last search option to select. Often users don't even clearly recognize that they need to select types of search results. 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 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 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 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 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 I feel that it has connected colleagues who would have never met in our global organization. I has created a division in the organization between the users and those who oppose its existence. It has been a great place for communication-oriented departments to get their messages out, advertise events, etc. Read full review ScreenShots