BoardPro offers board management software for small enterprise, small cap and nonprofit organizations. With it, users can create agendas, build board packs, record minutes, send actions and store files.
N/A
OpenText Vibe
Score 6.0 out of 10
N/A
OpenText Vibe (formerly Micro Focus Vibe) is a web-based team collaboration platform developed by Novell, and was initially released by Novell in June 2008 under the name of Novell Teaming. Novell's acquisition by Micro Focus was completed in April 2015.
The best scenarios for the use of BoardPro are highlighted when there is planning, development, coordination, execution and monitoring of projects and activities, in addition to being an information panel for all the members of the different teams of the organization, it provides the ability to hold meetings, an integrating element that stands out from other software. The management of the boards is exceptionally intuitive and easy to use, in addition to simplifying its content in a way that is easy to understand for all people, granting continuity and consistency to the work or works to be developed. An area of opportunity where it could be developed in a better way is offline work, since it will not be possible for your team members to work in this way.
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.
Agenda-setting and writing minutes is very easy with the built-in structure offered
Compiling and distributing Board packs with BoardPro takes a fraction of the time it used to - and updates to papers are so much easier
Ability to hold all governance documents in one central repository is useful for external Directors
Directors find the Board paper annotation feature very useful. New updates to this have made it an extremely powerful tool.
Flying Minutes feature is very useful for obtaining formal decisions between meetings and then automatically adding them to the next set of minutes.
The ability for Directors to update their own interests in the Interests Register is efficient and puts the responsibility on them to ensure this is up to date - this is automatically included in each Board pack.
The actions feature is fantastic - allocating a person responsible and an action deadline which then is followed up by BoardPro email reminders keeps people on tasks and allows the Chair to stay on top of actions as they are reported in the Board packs each meeting.
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.
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.
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.
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.
BoardPro is on a different playing field than monday.com, in fact, BoardPro is in a league of it's own. I used monday.com at a different organisation board and actually found that I did not use it. I found it easier to download and read the PDF board pack that was provided to me. The user interface of BoardPro is such that the software is easy to navigate and use, it is intuitive and such a delight to use.
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.
