Likelihood to Recommend Great for content management and records even for organizations whose staff are not much experienced in the technical backgrounds as it's easy to use and no previous knowledge on HTML is required. It is great for storing invoices and payment proofs and for organizations dealing with global clients for general use documents.
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 Document Management is being done well since it allows you to put in a corporate folder structure that applies to the business unit you currently work in. Records Management works well in this organisation as it allows you to classify the document according to the file plan, as well as manage it according to the retention schedule for tat file plan. The ability to collaborate on files works really well. You can share with users within your group, as well as allow other users access to the files for either read access to read/write access. Access control of the folder and even individual files allows you to ensure only necessary people can have the right type of access. This is especially welcome in the government environment where document management is of utmost importance. 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 user interface and configurability of that interface lack a lot of flexibility and modern tools. There needs to be stronger and more powerful integration to electronic forms and workflow capabilities which are core to modern ECM. Management of audit and content history needs to be modernized and made more dynamic and sustainable. 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 staff is comfortable with it and I doubt they'd change at this point.
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 The interface is easy to understand and learn quickly.
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 Reliability and Availability I never had any issues with access internally or via VPN. But, the response via VPN, was a bit slow.
Read full review Performance I used OpenText nearly every day and I never had any performance issues that I can recall. That said, it's not terribly fast either. Read full review Support Rating OpenText has an outstanding support and knowledge base. All problems which couldn't be solved by us (high complexity cases) were promptly resolved and the resolution also shared with us.
Read full review Implementation Rating No, it's pretty easy to implement and use.
Read full review 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 Having used OpenText Content Suite for a long time, I can say it stands the competition. It offers many versions which is unlike many products in its category. Also, while it is not affordable, I believe the cost is justified considering what a business can achieve with this software.
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 With OpenText Content Suite, we can easily keep documents safe Document collaboration is easy with OpenText We can easily handle invoicing and automation thanks to features such as content capture and imaging. With OpenText Content Suite, there is better file sync and archiving 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