Notes from HCL (formerly from IBM, acquired by HCL in late 2018) is a collaboration platform based on the Lotus platform.
N/A
Oracle Social Cloud (legacy)
Score 7.6 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Oracle Social Cloud helped marketers to discover, analyze, and respond across paid, owned and earned social channels to measure the impact of their data-driven campaigns. Oracle Social Cloud is a legacy product, and no longer available for sale.
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.
If you are looking to manage multiple social channels and quickly schedule posts it's a great tool. Not the best tool if you're looking to provide real time or near real time support and feedback to customers who are in the moment.
The ability to schedule months of content at a time and view it across a calendar.
The approval process - you can set up teams to create, edit, publish, approve etc.
The content and apps module allows you to create modules which can be displayed on your Facebook page under the tabs section. You can create interactive modules for your customers to view.
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 Menus are cluttered with extraneous, outdated options and features that modern users will never use, and Preferences are often difficult to navigate for those coming from Gmail or Outlook.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).
Videos posted to Facebook via SRM have to be clicked to run instead of running automatically.
No ability to boost posts or ads from SRM.
Due to privacy restrictions of various social streams, unable to listen to 'people'; can only listen to business pages.
Not able to publish the same post at the same hour across time zones. So, if you want to publish a post at 8 am EST and 8 am PST, you have to do 2 separate posts. Otherwise your 8 am EST will post at 5 am PST.
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.
Our personal support finally came back at the end of our contract, but their product just could not offer what the competition offered. Social media is moving fast, and you need to work with companies that understand that and are at the forefront of trends, you can't get stuck with a company that is standing still.
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.
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.
The personalized support of a single individual who gets to know your business and your needs is priceless. They will assist with anything from a technical glitch to a campaign strategy that has worked for other companies
Vitrue's training was limited online and not very in-depth, but the the platform is overall very easy to use and doesn't necessarily need a large amount of training.
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.
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.
I have used one other enterprise level application; it was comparable to SRM. We moved away from the first application because our parent company uses many other Oracle applications, not because we were 'unhappy' with the application we had at the time. Having said that, SRM does everything we need from it; in fact, there are features we aren't fully leveraging at this point. I especially find Engage, Content and Apps and Publish particularly useful. This is the kind of platform that is very robust; you get out of it what you have the time and resources for
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.
Audience. Before SRM, we had 1,000 Likes on Facebook. In 1 1/2 years using SRM, our Likes have grown to 20,000.
Frequency. Before SRM, we posted once a week on Facebook & Twitter. In 1 1/2 years using SRM, we now post 54 times a month, or about twice a day on weekdays.
Internal acceptance. Before SRM, social was considered "a hobby" by senior management. Now, social marketing is a key part of the strategy of every product launch. That is due to the hard work of our social marketing manager, of course, but her efforts were amplified by SRM.
