Likelihood to Recommend Suited for- It's a great one start shop for information. If you want your data all in one place and easy to access, you cannot beat LumApps for this. It's ease of placing pages across multiple sectors, menu navigation, and org chart integration are lovely. It showcases information and files very well with easy web page design that brings it all together. With only a little bit of training many people can use the product and create content. Less Appropriate- While great at what it does it is still a place to showcase information, not house it. It's not a replacement for Microsoft or Google regarding online file storage. It does not do the storage. It just makes files easy to access if your company houses them already. This same idea applies to Active Directory, it can do a lot of great customization of roles and allow/highlight information for people if they already have great data about people. It is a challenge if the backend data profiles of a person are not already syncing from other systems.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros Offers simple addition of custom content types that give the ability to apply different access and distribution levels. The HTML widget allows for the simple removal of WYSIWG tools to simplify the view for content contributors. The ability to rearrange layouts is very simple. Read full review 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. Read full review Cons The editing user interface is a bit wonky and occasionally glitchy. The back-end options are not organized super well, which can make it confusing to find the right settings. The customization options are somewhat limited without advanced CSS/dev skills, and the basic functions can be a bit challenging for some non-technical users. Read full review 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. Read full review Likelihood to Renew The tool is easy to use. Even without a dedicated product owner we feel confident using the system for our needs.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Usability If you are a content owner, you need to learn how to use the tools and this can be time-consuming and not simple. We rely on the support of our internal LumApps team to provide support and train us on the tools. But it is fairly convenient once you know how to use it correctly.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Support Rating Question and bug support are very helpful and quick. About the feature requests, we don’t have much visibility of the features that we suggested, or If they are going to implement some solutions or not.
Read full review Implementation Rating The implementation was good, it is the follow up that we need to do ourselves that takes time and effort.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Our organization selected LumApps for its customizability, integrations with the Google suite,
Slack , etc., in addition to the customizable meta-data that would allow for a unique user experience for our global teams so that users in the Latin American region, for example, would no longer be inundated with content that did not apply to their region or market.
Read full review 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.
Jason Preuss Web Development Specialist/Senior Research Analyst
Read full review Return on Investment after migration, it has reduced time for Internal Comms to create and publish content (for some content that we can import as a chart, like anniversary celebrations, we've been able to reduce the time from 4-6 hours down to about 15 minutes) we haven't used long it enough to see ROI on other facets, but not having divisions create their own websites unbeknownst to anyone else is invaluable Read full review 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. Read full review ScreenShots