HCL Unica (acquired by HCL Technologies from IBM in late 2018) is a suite of enterprise marketing management tools including marketing automation with cross-channel campaign management, budgeting and forecasting, project workflow management, asset management, brand management and spend management.
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Smartsheet
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Smartsheet is an online project management and collaboration tool. It includes automated alerts, instantaneous updating and sharing across team members, resource management, nested tasks organized in a hierarchy, a Gantt chart view, exportable and automated reports, and integration with email.
I think it is wel suited for a business with a lot of one on one relations in the database. For example a supermarket that sells products to a client and gives a reduction on that product. It is nice if the selection process is not to complex and does not involve to many calculations. It is also nice if it is very clear what you want to follow up. In our environment we have lots of many-to-many relations. for example one product is held by more then one client. And that client might have more of those products with other clients. These kind of situation demands for a lot of calculations with derived fields(*), and there things go far too slow. Unica is probably not such a good solution for us, because our environment is too complex, and so is to process of creating the selection, we often have to change things in the selection flows. Because of the complexity it is difficult to see what the flow is exactly doing afterwoods, it also takes to much time to modify existing campaigns. The interface is not handy to work with, if you have long lists of variables, of tables or derived fields(*) you have to scroll through trough them, you can not really search them or reorder them. You can not drag and drop fields or other objects like derived fields in the flow, what would be easy if you have to make frequent changes to the proces flow. When you copy objects something the content of the object changes because the links with other objects or lost. (*) derived field: field to calculate something
For teams and users who are very familiar with Excel and its mode of operation, Smartsheet will feel like a walkover. If you have a number of users who use Excel or Google Sheets for their personal project management then you will find this tool to be very useful and somewhat familiar.
Teams that may be used to other project management suites or styles would find Smartsheet a bit challenging to adapt to, as formulas and formatting can be challenging to adapt to.
Ability to translate Multiple SQL queries into a very easy to use visual GUI.
Provides the ability to pre-define segments, run them once in off hours, store them in their own system tables for quick youth and a significant reduction in CPU utilization on the database.
It’s use of Reusable objects. Including user variables to pre-define calculations one time, macros that you can create and pass values to parameterize the SQL code And the creation of templates to easily replicate work.
It’s ability to bring in external data on the fly that can very easily be mapped into any flowchart.
It’s flexibility and creating UNIX script via triggers to automate sending of files to multiple vendors with different FTP sites
It’s flexibility in the output layouts that it can create.
Greater integration of real time (Interact) capabilities with outbound channels, in particular IBM eMessage Email & SMS delivery.
Additional outbound channels to be integrated into eMessage, including Facebook Fanpage & Twitter DM broadcasts. At the moment these are possible only through custom additional integration.
Support for additional marketing database technology, e.g. MySQL, Exasol, ParAccel, WX2.
Provision of database technology with software purchase, as Web technology (IBM WebSphere Express) is supplied for free, but no database is supplied - since IBM also market DB2, which is a supported technology it seems a shame.
Smartsheet set up is similar to Excel, yet when you upload an Excel file, things like conditional formatting are lost. Smartsheet has its own conditional formatting, and you have to reinstate the rules. It would be great if those would apply automatically once a file is uploaded
Some Smartsheet management and access rules can take some tweaking to work properly. This may be a case of offering more info to admins so they can apply these better and with more efficiency
There are three main factors to renew a licence: 1) Cost to migrate to another platform would be rather expensive and time consuming, plus the requirement of retraining employees to use a new tool 2) It has been proven time and time again that it is a market leader in the space (10 years +) 3) It can be built upon, with the addition of additional IBM EMM modules - despite theories it does have very strong digital capabilities.
It definitely meets our needs as far as organizing and archiving our tasks and files. As we train more staff to view it, I see opportunities for more improvement, which I am sure this program can handle. I look forward to seeing continued improvement from Smartsheet on their capabilities and functionality.
Smartsheet is very easy to learn. However, while I have been able to pick it easily, Microsoft Excel and Project super users that I have trained on Smartsheet get bogged down in the differences and can find it frustrating. Explaining the differences ahead of time and why Smartsheet is being chosen instead of a different software seems to counteract those reactions
I give this rating because it fills a niche in the market. MS Project scares many away from proper task management but there are limited tools our there, especially cloud-based that are mobile-friendly. Smartsheet fills this market gap, especially for small to medium-sized businesses. IT is not fair to compare it to MS Project, but fairer to see what gaps it fills.
- We had to rebuild a part of the datamart afterwards to tighten up and simplify the selection process. But as it was too time consuming to rebuild all the existing campaigns, we no run campaigns on different versions of the datamart. - The response tracking of the campaigns never worked out well, it was impossible to implement a direct response where there is a link between the lead and the response in our operational process
It's absolutely paramount to take a few minutes to actually play with the software. It's nearly impossible to do anything wrong or make a mistake which cannot be fixed easily. Under the help menu is Live Training option. After you familiarize yourself with the commands, watch the live training for some in depth understanding of how to make the software fit your needs perfectly.
The contact history and the response history are so powerful. You can track whatever you want to help the call center to push relevant offers to our customer. In addition, predictive models can be built, with patience, in IBM Campaign. If you have some complaints from the call center about any campaigns, you can easily validate it into the contact or response history.
Jira and Redmine are much more robust and technologically advanced project management solutions. I enjoy using either when managing a very large project. However, I prefer to use Smartsheet for my smaller to medium sized projects. As for Google Drive - I would say that Google sheets and Smartsheet are almost identical in my opinion when it comes to functionality. Personally I prefer to manage smaller projects via Google Drive, but it is a personal preference!
