Igloo vs. OpenText Vibe

Igloo is a well-suited option for teams/companies that want to build an employee intranet with some other interesting features, like file storage and sharing, internal communications, and resource and knowledge management. All of these features may help your workers increase productivity significantly by centralizing everything in one robust and reliable platform. However, it can be less appropriate if costs are a problem for you, due to the pricing. So, if you will not be using several features and just want an intranet for you company, you may want to go with another solution.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Notifications: Igloo can push email updates to users.
• Organization: Igloo allows for you to create pages, sub pages, and many layer deep sections. You can also organize the layout of your pages.
• Versioning: it's super easy to reserve and edit documents for offline use. And you can see who last edited a document and when.
• Offline access: there's a desktop version you can use very easily. It's really good for dropping a bunch of files at once.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Their UI is not used-friendly. Their use of Igloo-specific terminology made it difficult to understand how each function of the site worked. They would repeatedly say, for example, "a ___ is really a ___" vs. just calling it what the function actually is.
• Implementation was a far cry from their sales support. After basically nickel-and-diming you for everything, they - very poorly - cap your use of their implementation support team.
• Overall, Igloo didn't work for our organization because they do multiple things decently vs a few things excellently. The experience with Igloo was unremarkable.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

The implementation was good, it is the follow up that we need to do ourselves that takes time and effort.

Easy to use, cost-effective, and benefit in organizational culture development and information sharing across various employees and from higher management. Great customer support and continuous development to make the software better for users. It allows better collaboration with a little bit of fun too and requires less resources to handle.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Helps with employee retention - especially in a virtual environment.
• Costs less than a separate wiki system for storing key information.

Incentivized

• Novell Vibe has increased employee efficiency by providing a central file repository for our team.
• Novell Vibe has increased our customer service capabilities by allowing our team to track customer projects and support issues more effectively.