Jive-x (Discontinued) vs Vanilla Forums

• I write these from the perspective of the Community Manager - You can choose your level of moderation on Jive to match the policies of your organisation. From full on content pre-moderation to to completely reactive moderation, you can take your pick. We chose the latter end of the spectrum, trust your colleagues to be professional and you will be rewarded with professional content.
• The ability for users to set up their own groups very easily with out the need to revert to developers is great as this allows individuality. This allows for organic growth with out impact on the budgets of departments and teams to get their work done on Jive. The option is always there to get 'someone in to fancy it up a bit' however you will find that your own people will develop those skills themselves. Your users will also learn from each other and you should actively encourage stealing of best practice from across your organisation.
• The knowledge repository or Question and Answer features are the most value-adding for me. Having searchable history that allows your to get answers quickly so the next question can be asked is the reason why you should have a collaboration platform in the first place, Jive makes that easy.
• Single Sign On has been a excellent addition for us, if Jive does not make your colleagues lives easier then they won't use it.
• You can customize and brand Jive to reflect your company identity.

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• Gamification: The ability to incentivise community members to get involved with ranks and badges is one of the main reasons that we purchased the tool.
• Support: The Vanilla support team are incredible, often responding to issues very late at night and proactively fixing issues as soon as they occur.
• Customisation: Vanilla can be completely styled with css allowing us to match it to the branding of the rest of our website.

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• No QA environment. It's cloud-based so you need to purchase another instance to set up a QA environment.
• The gamification system is not as user intuitive as you'd expect. The admin spends more time setting up opportunities than they should need to.
• Jive-x was bought out by three different companies in the last 2 years. There is an uncertainty of how long it will be supported and updated.

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• There are some features I wish Vanilla would implement that could improve ease of use in our specific community, but some of the ideas we have are not necessarily something that would benefit all of the forums that Vanilla works with.
• In the past, we've had issues with releases breaking some of our specific site features they built for us, but this has improved drastically recently.

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• Hard to quantify the results...but I also left the company before we had built a mature instance of Jive in-house so the final results/impact were yet to be fully realized and measured.
• The use of Jive brought together multiple-departments for the first time in our 50+ year old company to truly build an "end-to-end" approach to our marketing/sales/fulfillment/customer service engine. It was truly phenomenal to watch how the internal life-cycle of a prospect-turned-customer literally transformed and unified our inter-departmental teams through the use of Jive Engage.

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• Increased uptime and overall speed in the forum (compared to our previous phpbb solution)
• Increased usage by users which resulted in a higher pages/session in a short amount of time

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