Likelihood to Recommend 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 I think it is well-suited for populations who value social media and being connected in this manner at work. If the population does not value this type of open interaction, it will be underutilized. Many of our baby-boomer generation staff have a hard time seeing the relevancy of a site such as this.
Read full review Pros 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 I think it helps people crowd source an organization for information and resources that may not be easily found. The subjects feature is a great place to develop communities of practice where links, files and communication can be shared. As long as the search engine is optimized / working effectively, it can be a powerful way to access sites and resources across the organization. Read full review Cons 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 The profile finder is glitchy and rarely comes up with solid results. The site sometimes has glitches, such as subject pages not loading and complete content not appearing on the screen until you refresh or give it an abnormal amount of time to load. The "USAID Search" option should appear first for the search results. It is not intuitive that it is the last search option to select. Often users don't even clearly recognize that they need to select types of search results. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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 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 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 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 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 I feel that it has connected colleagues who would have never met in our global organization. I has created a division in the organization between the users and those who oppose its existence. It has been a great place for communication-oriented departments to get their messages out, advertise events, etc. Read full review ScreenShots