Discourse is a community management and moderation product.
$20
per month
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.
[Discourse is by] far the best online forum platform in the industry. It may be a little pricey for people looking for a cheap option for their hobby forum, but for any type of business that relies on a forum, the pricing is more than fair.
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.
User Privileges : Teams, Trust Levels, Moderation, Private and Public Threads make it possible to have as much transparency, privacy or power decentralization as one wishes.
Gamification: Badges and Achievements can be customized for User Activity and frequent readers and writers.
Mailing List mode: Users can choose to use forum threads without the User Interface by subscribing via mailing list mode.
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.
Vanilla's mobile functionality was downright awful and it felt like it was stuck in the 2000s. While they have similar features, Discourse blows them away in almost every department. We don't regret switching at all.
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.
Community Members are eager to jump into the discussion.
Conversations can be tracked easier without the risk of being lost in a sea of messages as people tend to construct their posts more carefully than on any workspace messenger.
It's open source and configurable with many other add-ons to help integration with other services.
