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ChangePoint (discontinued) vs. Lightning Tools Lightning Conductor

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    ChangePoint (discontinued)

    Score7.5 out of 10
    N/AChangepoint, a discontinued product, began as a professional services automation and portfolio management product, was acquired by Compuware in 2004, and was later divested to Marlin Equity Partners in 2014. Under Changepoint, the company acquired Daptiv that same year, combining its professional services automation capabilities with SaaS project portfolio management. Planview acquired Changepoint in 2021 and offered it as Planview ChangePoint. It is no longer available to new customers.N/A

    Lightning Tools Lightning Conductor

    Score9 out of 10
    Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
    The Lightning Conductor is a content aggregation tool for Microsoft SharePoint Online and Microsoft Teams. Users can build rich, modern content reports based upon SharePoint lists, SharePoint Search, Microsoft Graph or Microsoft 365 Groups. Content can be aggregated from lists and libraries, and other applications such as Planner, To Do, OneDrive, and Teams.

    $2,200

    per year per installation

    Pricing
    ChangePoint (discontinued)Lightning Tools Lightning Conductor
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    Lightning Conductor WSP
    From 1950
    per year One WFE
    Lightning Conductor Enterprise Edition
    POA
    per year Four or more WFE
    Lightning Conductor Online
    From 2200
    per year per installation
    Lightning Conductor Plus (Includes Data Viewer)
    From 2500
    per year per installation
    Lightning Conductor Online Enterprise Edition (>10,000 users)
    POA
    per year per installation
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    ChangePoint (discontinued)Lightning Tools Lightning Conductor
    Free Trial
    NoYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoYes
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details—Prices stated are minimum per installation for "stock" products. $2.20 per user/year on top of base price. Enterprise editions can be amended to suit business needs if deemed necessary, additional costs incurred and TBD. All packages include free technical support. Free upgrades available to latest versions of tool as they are released. (online version)
    More Pricing Information
    Features
    ChangePoint (discontinued)Lightning Tools Lightning Conductor
    Project Management
    Comparison of Project Management features of ChangePoint (discontinued) and Lightning Tools Lightning Conductor
    Feature
    ChangePoint (discontinued)
    -
    Ratings
    Lightning Tools Lightning Conductor
    8.6
    2 Ratings
    11% above category average
    Task Management00 Ratings8.82 Ratings
    Search00 Ratings8.42 Ratings
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    ChangePoint (discontinued)Lightning Tools Lightning Conductor
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    User Ratings
    ChangePoint (discontinued)Lightning Tools Lightning Conductor
    Likelihood to Recommend
    7.5
    (16 ratings)
    9.0
    (4 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    7.6
    (10 ratings)
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    Usability
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    ChangePoint (discontinued)Lightning Tools Lightning Conductor
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Discontinued Products
    Changepoint is basic and would, therefore, work for businesses with uncomplicated requests, pretty straightforward workflows and willingness to work with an unsightly solution. It is basic, from the UI to the search option and the way the information is captured, which can be frustrating and counter-intuitive at times. It is relatively robust (i.e. I have been using it for almost 2 years and have not seen it crash once) but it does log me out when the system has been inactive for about 30 minutes - and I am only notified about being logged out upon clicking the Submit button, meaning many a line of text have been typed more than once!
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Lightning Tools
    Having experience of SharePoint On Premise and also SharePoint Online, there isn't an out of the box app/webpart that enables you to 'roll up content' from a variety of source's (in my case SP Lists, but there are many other data sources it works with) across site collections with an easy to use and intuitive interface which is what Lightning tools excels at.
    Read full review
    Pros
    Discontinued Products
    • Changepoint has significant reporting capabilities, though of course, the data that comes out is only as good as the data that goes in. I enjoy being able to use the standard reports to understand exactly how much a project has cost us and to compare it to how much we are charging. This allows us to more accurately set our prices. Though we have not used the report designer capability, I understand that custom reports can be designed with relative ease.
    • Changepoint has a versioning capability for changes made to user profiles in the system manager, which I find particularly helpful. As a non-power user, it is valuable to be able to see what changes I have made to various profiles so that I can troubleshoot a problem down the line.
    • Changepoint has significant functionality well beyond the features that we are currently using, and for this reason, I think it is affordable and a good deal. Particularly if your organization is interested in dedicating the time and resources into using all of the features around project planning, resource allocation, etc., the price is well worth the value.
    Read full review
    Lightning Tools
    • Aggregate documents across SharePoint site & libraries
    • Filtering for owner/person responsible & due dates
    • Ease of end-user filtering on columns
    • Color-coding & other formatting
    Read full review
    Cons
    Discontinued Products
    • We use Changepoint to manage the IS organization. I would like to see more advancement in order to do benefits management.
    • I would like to see a capability where a project manager can build a very detailed work breakdown structure, but only require project resources to charge time and provide a task status at a higher level.
    Read full review
    Lightning Tools
    • Mobile Friendly
    • Calendar/Gantt views
    • Complex/Custom Logic
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Discontinued Products
    Sometimes the decision to renew boils down to an old adage "if it isn't broken don't fix it". Previous to moving to Changepoint, it was obvious that we needed a better project management tool. Projects we completed on time but the time zone difference between the teams and several iterations of back and forth caused a number of communication issues with projects. The difference is night and day.
    Read full review
    Lightning Tools
    No answers on this topic
    Usability
    Discontinued Products
    It could be more intuitive and user friendly.
    Read full review
    Lightning Tools
    No answers on this topic
    Support Rating
    Discontinued Products
    No answers on this topic
    Lightning Tools
    The Lightning Tools support team responds quickly, and team members are very friendly and helpful.
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    Discontinued Products
    Planview Changepoint helps us to understand our key customers enabling us to capitalize on every financial opportunity and helps us to forecast demand against the capacities required for new opportunities, and also it automates and monitors contractual terms and conditions. It gives us visibility into our employees' skills and helps to optimize resource allocation.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Lightning Tools
    I haven't found another product to compare this one to. Only in SharePoint Online which has a similar App 'Highlight Webpart' ... it's far too complicated to set up and requires learning yet another language and exporting and importing via PowerShell to get any real results that would be useful.
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    Discontinued Products
    • Employee efficiency has decreased significantly within our Project MAnagement team. The main causes are lack of logical steps/not user-friendly and the slowness of the entire program.
    • Changepoint PSA has greatly improved being able to track budgets for all projects. Before this software, budgets were done manually by hand and cross-referenced with Accounting. Now, we can pull a report out of the system, as long as all parties entered their time and data correctly.
    Read full review
    Lightning Tools
    • Policies easier to portray
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    Lightning Tools Lightning Conductor Screenshots

    Screenshot of MODERN SHAREPOINT LIST ROLLUP
The Lightning Conductor is a SharePoint Content Aggregator that can be configured quickly by business users. The Lightning Conductor can be used to aggregate content from SharePoint Lists such as Tasks, Document Libraries, Contact Lists, and Custom Lists making it easy to view content in one place even if it is distributed across many sites and site collections. Key data can be highlighted using conditional formatting and data-bars as shown. Content from Search and Microsoft Graph can also be aggregated with the Lightning Conductor.Screenshot of CONTENT AGGREGATION WITHIN MICROSOFT TEAMS
The Lightning Conductor Web Part can be used within Microsoft SharePoint or Microsoft Teams. Even if content is stored within SharePoint sites, it is useful to have aggregated Documents, Tasks, Announcements, Calendars or Custom Lists from multiple sites displayed in a single handy view in Microsoft Teams. The Lightning Conductor can be added as a Teams Tab in any Microsoft Teams Channel.Screenshot of BUILDING REPORTS ON MICROSOFT GRAPH
The Lightning Conductor can be used (without code) to aggregate content from Microsoft Graph as well as Search and SharePoint Lists. This example displays Microsoft Planner Plans and Microsoft Planner Tasks where users can Add new Tasks, Assign Users to Planner Tasks, Delete Tasks, and Complete Tasks. The same can be performed on Microsoft To Do items and displayed within Modern SharePoint pages or Microsoft Teams Tabs. The Lighting Conductor can also contain multiple views of content, making it ideal to display all of your tasks from SharePoint Task lists, Microsoft To Do and Microsoft Planner in a single web part or Teams Tab.

*Microsoft Graph Reports are only available for SharePoint Online and not SharePoint 2019.Screenshot of BUILDING REPORTS ON MICROSOFT 365 GROUPS
Powered by Microsoft Graph, the Microsoft 365 Group Rollup Provider enables users to aggregate content by browsing and selecting Microsoft 365 Groups. Within Microsoft 365 Groups, you’ll be able to select entities such as Drive Items, Owners, Members, Planner Plans, Planner Tasks, Events, Posts,  Sites, Lists, and Calendars.

*Microsoft Graph Reports are only available for SharePoint Online and not SharePoint 2019.Screenshot of AGGREGATING USING SEARCH
When performance is critical, search can be used for rollups. The Lightning Conductor offers three data source configurations to get to content. Object Model (Real Time Aggregation from SharePoint Lists), Microsoft Graph (Aggregation from Graph Entities such as Planner, OneDrive, Outlook), and Search. The Search Data Source enables the aggregation of content from large SharePoint lists and libraries when performance is critical. Thousands of documents can be displayed in under a second using Search.Screenshot of HIGHLIGHTING KEY BUSINESS DATA WITHIN VIEWS
End users and Site Owners can highlight the data that is important to them, the data that they need to prioritize. Using conditional formatting, data bars, and icons, conditions can be configured to highlight the data that is most important. Icons and Data Bars can be any color or size desired. Examples include highlighting High Priority tasks, Showing data bars for the completion progress of Tasks, or indicating which tasks are assigned to any particular user.