OpenText Vibe (formerly Micro Focus Vibe) is a web-based team collaboration platform developed by Novell, and was initially released by Novell in June 2008 under the name of Novell Teaming. Novell's acquisition by Micro Focus was completed in April 2015.
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Podio
Score 7.3 out of 10
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Podio is a cloud-based platform for organizing team communication, business processes, and reporting in project management workspaces; also it may be used as a light CRM platform. It enables workflow automation and integrations. It includes a free version and paid packages with additional features.
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.
[Citrix Podios's] customer support is very quick and they provide you an option to convert your project into small tasks so that you can better assist your team and extract maximum work out of them hence I will totally recommend its usage. I could not think that keeping track of tasks could be this much easier and smart. It is a fully customizable tool that manages my tasks efficiently and deal with them effectively.
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.
Very easy for people without coding or technical skills to set up and maintain information in "Apps".
Platform is very easy to learn and adopt--it's intuitive.
Project management potential is awesome--instead of having to fit your projects into a structure that is industry specific, you can build an app that tracks what you want, in the order you want it.
Has a "relationship" field that allows you to relate an individual item or record to a record in another app. It effectively gives some of the functionality of a relational database.
Very useful for information sharing when staff members are in different regions or places.
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.
A customizable profile status – would love to work with Podio in silent mode (logged in while working, but "not available" for requests when in heavy work mode)
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.
Podio customer service is great. The cloud and mobile service is fast (almost instant, continuous syncing). With a solid user base, and backed by Citrix, this is a serious business solution. They're also constantly working on improving and making it more powerful. I anticipate it only getting better
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.
Podio support was always responsive and very quick to provide answers and assistance during the history of using this product, their support team has always been top notch. There have been several cases where calling podio support a feature was not available and they provided either workaround solutions or added the features straight into their roadmap.
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.
Compared to Salesforce: Podio is not as robust as a tool for CRM tracking. It also doesn't have the in-email capabilities that SF offers. Compared to Basecamp: Podio is somewhat similar to Basecamp but doesn't offer the same functionality with checking items off and archiving projects. Compared to Zoho Projects: Podio is vastly superior to Zoho Project's lack of flexibility (requiring a development team to build) and accessibility by all members (Zoho Projects requires a very limited number of "owners" of projects which makes it difficult if multiple owners need to assign one or more people to a project).
Podio is great for task assignment and tracking. The ability to enter and assign tasks from mobile and track their completion saves me several phone calls a day.
Podio outdoes email as my go to place to search for information. The ability to forward emails into the system, organize by projects and contacts, and search it all saves considerable time and confusion.
Podio has considerable potential to reduce overall admin time spent organizing information (filing, tracking, etc) The ability to keep a single record of a given piece of information without being tied to email vs file structure works very well.
