Likelihood to Recommend ETO Social Solutions should be avoided until they start caring about the problems generated by their software. In regards specifically to the ARMS suite utilized by the entire state of California, until the ETO software learns how to speak with SOMS, and unless it can be customized by knowledgeable people who consult with front-line users. It is not appropriate to provide the state legislature with bad data. I have 6 years of experience with it and I have multiple sources of agreement from fellow users throughout the state.
Read full review OnBase is a content services solution for organizations that need high visibility to documents or information across multiple teams or departments. It supports users' access control, workflow functionality with transaction history, electronic document retention, and destruction documentation. Hyland can support the organization for implementations or solutions, or the organization can utilize the education services and build out the solution themselves.
Read full review Pros ETO's customization allows for the use of so many different and unique applications. The ability to build extremely customized reports also allows us to get very detail oriented results or very broad building wide stats. The additional added features such as workflow, referrals, and ETO Engage are useful in their own way and add more ways to better track and record data while simplifying some end-user processes. Read full review Workflow and Configuration - easy to learn Documentation for each application and toolset Hyland Account Managers and staff are knowledgeable Robust User Community that helps solve an issue or make recommendations Web client - no application installation needed on a PC for users Read full review Cons The user interface is not intuitive and exceptionally difficult for non-tech savvy people to learn. The system is not as customizable as we were led to believe at the initial purchase. The system does not interface well with other systems. Organizationally we are moving towards data integration, and we will likely replace ETO because of this limitation. Considering the limitations of the system, the cost is quite high. We've seen only marginal benefits of this system over pen and paper, and the ROI is not promising. The initial build process was very frustrating. We didn't understand what the developer was billing us for. Something like simple touchpoint forms was billed for more hours than it would seem to require. A system like this should be both fully mobile compatible and have offline functionality. We would benefit from more nuanced security settings. Read full review I personally find the user inferface to be obnoxious and obtuse. When we have issues it is often hard to resolve the problem as there are many variables such as file types, DPI, and scanner setting that combine to make it hard to pinpoint trouble spots. The upgrade process has always been a nightmare for our team. We are not on the latest version now due to this issue. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Social Solutions has been great for our organization. It has allowed us to not only report on data, but to dive into it to see trends and give snapshots of the current status of our neighbors. Social Solutions has been helpful in getting us to see additional ways we can use our data and ways that it is easier for front line staff to use this tool
Read full review OnBase has become a core part of our enterprise solutions toolkit due to its ever-growing integration capabilities. Any business process that produces or tracks documents or object entities can be modeled and managed within OnBase and used to supplement almost any line-of-business system that we use.
Read full review Usability As a technically savvy person with experience learning new database software systems I find ETO relatively straightforward now that I've been trained in it's use. However, many of our staff are less technically savvy and the learning curve for ETO can be grueling for many, who require frequent troubleshooting and support from me. Additionally, there are small quality of life improvements that would increase usability even for me - such as allowing multiple tabs to be open simultaneously or being able to use the browser's "back" and "forward" buttons.
Read full review You get out of something what you put into it. You reap what you sow! If an organization will spend time setting the solution up, dedicating staff to its development and ongoing support, and always keep the end-user in mind during development, you will have one of the most well-received solutions in your organization. So many organizations that I speak with stand up a solution but don't commit someone to its upkeep and development. It is vital that you have the staff to work within the solution on a daily basis.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Routine maintenance is announced with plenty of lead time, and the few times I've been unable to log in to the system properly a simple refresh was all that was required to fix.
Read full review Performance Mostly really strong now, although I understand that for some years before switching their hosting service to AWS performance was a real issue with ETO and we had frequent problems with pages timing out or other glitches stemming from performance issues. With AWS that is mostly a thing of the past, although it is still a major issue with the reporting tool which is unable to run reports on the entire database due to performance limitations, instead requiring admins to define universes prior to running queries.
Read full review Support Rating We love the first tier customer support folks! They're friendly, helpful, and knowledgeable within the scope of their position. The experiences we've had with their supervisors have also been mostly good and again they seem to be doing what they can within the scope of their positions. This is what prevents me from selecting 1. Unfortunately, none of these wonderful folks can offer real solutions when things are actually broken. They verify there's a problem and send it to the black hole called "the developers". After that, we don't hear anything useful and we figure out how to live with/work around the problem ourselves. (Requests for updates typically get "still with the developer" responses.) This is highly frustrating given that most of our issues are basic system issues (functionality that worked then broke after an update by Social Solutions, servers not syncing, report universes not flattening automatically, etc.). All we want is for the system to work as designed and to be fixed in a timely fashion when it doesn't. Apparently, that's too much to ask. (And no, we don't expect it to happen instantly, programming and quality control checks obviously take time.)
Read full review This rating is a compromise because I technically have 2 tiers of support. I go through a re-seller that I give a (10). I send an email and receive acknowledgment within minutes. For the few times we need to contact Hyland for assistance, it sometimes takes a couple of days to receive a response - and then the first tier might go back and forth a dozen times through email instead of initiating a phone call. And for an advanced issue, they take too long before they forward to an evangelist or someone more knowledgeable that is able to assist. I give that process an (8).
Read full review In-Person Training The trainer was very knowledgeable and was a Hyland employee. The training was at their corporate headquarters, so it allowed our team to become familiar with organization and culture.
Read full review Online Training Really good trainer and exhaustive curriculum covered, but ETO is a complex enough system that you don't *really* know how to use it until you've been in the trenches for a few weeks. For instance, I took a Report Writing training and emerged with some fluency in the reports interface and a vague understanding of the process, but immediately encountered a legion of instance-specific idiosyncrasies that would have been totally impossible to address in a webinar training for a dozen folks from different orgs working in different instances.
Read full review With the Premium subscription, there is a tone of training with audio and practice options.
Read full review Implementation Rating Hard to say, as I was not with the agency at the time. However, based on our use of the software ~5years later I can say that there were no catastrophic design choices made during implementation that have become unduly burdensome as we've scaled up.
Read full review Using Hyland professional services to assist with the implementation made things much easier. They have the knowledge and experience to get the system live as users are expecting
Read full review Alternatives Considered When we made our decision several years ago Social Solutions had just acquired Apricot. At that time it was recommended to use ETO based off our revenue stream. However, it seems like Social Solutions has put in a lot more time and effort into Apricot over ETO and it seems more modern and user friendly. I think it is worth a second look once our contract expires
Read full review The version of
SharePoint we were utilizing was not very practical. We oftentimes had issues with archived documents, where they could be found or opening them all together. It seemed the older the document the harder it was to access when logged into
SharePoint . This is critical in our business as we need to behave full access to documentation sent and received for an owner's account.
Read full review Scalability The core product scales well, and we've grown quite a bit as an agency during our use of ETO. However, there are some real pain points particularly around creating new programs and managing report universes that require extensive offline checklist resources and a full-spectrum understanding of how changing settings in one part of ETO can have downstream impact in other areas. This can introduce a "chilling" effect on proposed changes to the system, where there is strong incentive to leave things as-is to avoid unforeseen consequences.
Read full review Return on Investment I would say that at this point the overall ROI has been negative as we aren't getting much more out of our data by the switch we made to ETO, but the cost is much higher. I anticipate that will change as we get better at using ETO. Most users that have switched to ETO in our organization prefer it to what they were using before and some are more appreciative of the value they can get from the data. Read full review OnBase provides a very reliable ECM platform for the company. OnBase helped to remove the dependency on paper files and file folders. This saved real estate cost as well as facilitated the ability to work from anywhere. OnBase made same day processing of all incoming and outgoing documents a reality. Read full review ScreenShots