Glip was a conversation platform to plan, share and organize work. Glip featured text and video chat at its core, with file sharing, collaborative task management, shared calendars, and automatic version control. Glip was acquired by RingCentral in 2015 and is no longer available standalone, though its features are included in RingCentral MVP.
$11.99
Per User Per Month
HCL Notes
Score 6.6 out of 10
N/A
Notes from HCL (formerly from IBM, acquired by HCL in late 2018) is a collaboration platform based on the Lotus platform.
Glip should definitely be on your shortlist for a team collaboration tool. Glip has a lower cost and contains all the features found in competitive tools such as Microsoft Teams and Webex Teams. Glip is also scalable and robust enough for large enterprises and is great to coordinate and document large projects with hundreds of tasks and hundreds of resources. Glip, MS, and Webex Teams are excellent for an individual to create and receive task assignments and document and complete those tasks but these tools do not replace enterprise project management software and tools. Glip, MS Teams, and Webex Teams quickly become complicated and disorganized and it becomes easy to drown in all the sea of data unless you work diligently and continually at organizing your workspace.
I often work with teams from other country and regions, hence HCL Notes is a very useful platform for internal company management operations. It standardized organisational work standards in most of the offices worldwide. HCL Notes also enables chat with other team around the world that I find very helpful when initiating conversation or just want to have a quick update rather than sending emails and waiting for replies. However, HCL Notes is not very efficient in web browsing and user still need to use other internet service providers.
Notes' backwards compatibility sometimes gets in the way. Menus are cluttered with extraneous, outdated options and features that modern users will never use, and Preferences are often difficult to navigate for those coming from Gmail or Outlook. We have greatly simplified this via Policies, but users still find it daunting to go through all the options that are available.
The IBM Notes client for Windows & Mac is essentially the Eclipse Java development platform...so it is HUGE. Performance initially was very slow but IBM has done a good job of speeding things up. As IBM moves more toward cloud-delivered applications, this will not be as much of a problem.
Notes and Domino can be complex to manage for administrators who are more accustomed to ActiveDirectory, Group Policy, etc. Editing a notes.ini file to add a feature, or working with XML files by hand to create a SmartUpgrade kit can be daunting to those coming from more modern administrative roles.
Some users claim to "hate" Notes mail. While I have heard this less and less over the past 10 years, we have had 3rd party software offer plugins to Outlook and it's rare to see any for Notes.
The client update process should be automated more. I would like to see the Notes client update quietly and quickly more like an Adobe software update. If an update fails it should automatically try again without prompting the user over and over.
Notes multiple language spell checking is a downloaded add-on Java-based resource that has to be deployed in a convoluted way that is difficult for users to grasp. Therefore any foreign language spell check updates must be done individually per Notes client by IT, which is unfortunate. I would prefer to see that be a "live download" update option for users to get directly from IBM (don't make me download it and put it on my network).
Glip has saved us so much time that my team could no longer live without it. I don't know what we would do. All of us used it constantly all day every day. It is one of the best tools in my arsenal!
I've been in IT business and as a Programmer/Developer for 20+ years with too many programming languages experiences/back ground (C/C++/Visual Basic/Basic Program/Unix/COBOL/Java). Also with 18+ years with Lotus Notes/IBM Domino, I am still and always think Lotus Notes is the best RAD platform available!. When the time where resource is very limited and the expectation is very high and the turn around is too short, IBM Domino/Notes is the platform to use and it's the only choice available.
Easy to use for the user, most of the apps we developed, there is not much need for user training. Most of the times, we just do a demo to the users group and they can pick up from there.
We have a free account so I understand why we are not at the top of the list. But we have had issues before that took forever for them to get back to us. Once I had to make a Twitter account just to tweet at them about the issue and they finally got back to me. After several weeks. And the issue was something we just had to wait out for a few more days. Normally you have to submit a ticket through their support page and maybe they will get back to you and maybe not. We had one issue where the standard user on the iMac was getting popups every few minutes about installing a helper tool. The only way to fix this was to delete and reinstall Glip as an admin user. This was frustrating because it took time to do this for me as the IT person, and after reaching out to a few times, I was finally given an answer two years after I had asked about it! Finally some devs reach out to me on Glip and told me to just put the app in the user folder instead of the app folder which is managed by the admin account. They said it should be fixed now and I believe it is.
I've been using the production for a very long time and very happy with it. Also, all the online resources and forums for notes is very friendly and easy/quick for getting help. I found out that compared to Microsoft or Oracle or any other platforms, IBM Notes online forum is the best I have seen.
Implementation is easy and smooth if the requirement is well gathered/documented. Notes is a RAD platform, all projects in Notes is simple in the implementation step.
Zoom, Slack, and Wunderlist are all great applications. They do a good job at one core focus. If your team is already familiar with these applications and satisfied with them, you can stick with them. I found Slack confusing and difficult to learn, as did others when onboarding. Zoom and Wunderlist both have a solid user interface and do their jobs well -- not many complaints from them. I just valued simplicity and ease of adoption, which made us look at Glip as one app to do it all.
Outlook has been considered for years as a replacement platform. Pricing and support staff made it prohibitive. Our long-time use of Microsoft Office productivity suite naturally led us to consider the adoption of Office365. A recent investigation told us that Azure Cloud services propel an O365 solution to the forefront. Early adopters in international divisions have paved the way for Azure and O365.
Because Glip was free, it helped us save money on our chat app. While not a crucial part of the business, the costs of software for your company add up and it was nice that, in this case, it did not add to our expenses.
This isn't really Glip directly, but we used it because we were using RingCentral Meetings for video conferencing with clients, and unfortunately RingCentral Meetings was a bit difficult to use. This was often the client doing things wrong, but it was annoying to have frequent audio feedback, etc. So if that is part of your reason to use Glip, check out if you have any problems there first.
Over the years, we have lost countless hours of productivity from the thousands of crashes we have experienced.
One benefit of IBM Notes is that it is very simple to train a new user on. Many people prefer and are familiar with Google tools, but those that use IBM Notes have very little trouble acclimating themselves.
