Compendium (discontinued) vs. CommUnity by Personify

Oracle is great for a very basic blog. The look of ours was designed and built on the back end/code side, so I'm not sure if there are a lot of clean, modern templates like you see in a lot of blogs today to choose from or not. It has been great having a number of authors who can write content directly in the platform and then submit it to our content managers for scheduling and publishing. I think the biggest issue people may have with it is the look of the interface. It needs an update.

Incentivized

You can tell from the CEO and all staff that this is a very competent company that wants you to succeed with integrity. There is a strong
support and services team that works collaboratively with us to make
sure we are always getting what we need. They provide
24x7 emergency support, online ticket support, email support, a client
community, and the ability to call and talk to the same account manager or
community consultant every time (I even have Mariano's skype and he replies on weekends!). They recently launched a client community - so they are now even practicing what they preach. Our questions in the client community are always answered quickly.

• Permission levels are also nice so a random user cannot just post without a certain level of access.
• I also like being able to update the code if necessary.
• It's easy for users to access and write, and there's a nice workflow to review any content before it gets published.

Incentivized

• It's easy to use. The admin panel has a number of drag and drop options to modify the experience
• Flexibility. There are a large number of standard block features that can be added to areas. In addition, each dynamic block as a number of settings that allow you to tailor the experience you want to create. You can do this without being a programmer.
• Personalization. There are good tools that allow you to personalize the experience based on whether users are logged in or not, whether they are in particular segments (which we can create) or recommendations based on information the user has provided about themselves.
• Mobile. Small World Labs has a really great way of doing mobile. They give you a drag and drop interface for designing the mobile environment so there is a lot of flexibility with this. We are currently turning this module on.

• Templates are a good thing, but hard to set up and require a lot of work. (Other Oracle tools are more user-friendly when it comes to template design.)
• While they did a good job updating the interface, I still believe more work can be done to make it more user-friendly.

Incentivized

• Integration with our Association Management System (AMS) didn't go as smoothly as I had wished. Having said that all of the issues with that integration have been addressed.
• Because the platform is updated so frequently you need to stay on top of what is available to you and your end users or you may miss out on key functionality releases.

Easy to use, and supporting several permutations, the CM suite is an excellent solution for a mid to large size business. It's meant to be used by a team, and the functionality can work across websites and landing pages. There's also the high benefit of translation management, providing support for localized products.

Incentivized

From the first conversation and beyond, it has been a pleasure working with Small World Labs. Their staff are genuinely interested in understanding our business and our goals, and actively make recommendation on continued improvement and long-term strategy. All of their staff demonstrate a clear understanding of the product and when to expect new features. Furthermore, their CEO, Michael Wilson, is more than competent and has proven to be an industry expert. He understands both the technical side and the community strategy side of the business. In fact, we have already initiated a project to build a second community with Small World Labs for a separate business unit

It has never been down since we have used this software.

Incentivized

There are a multitude of options to configure the exact user experience you want and what you want to emphasize.

Uptime has never been an issue.

Speed is not an issue.

To be perfectly honest, every one of my concerns and problems has been handled by the support team in a very timely manner. If they could not fix my issue they assured me it be addressed in future updates.

Incentivized

The people at Small World Labs are very accessible. I can email, open a ticket, or call and they are there. I'd also point out that senior management is quite available too. We frequently have talks about potential strategies and new things we might be doing, which is great. I think the whole organization genuinely likes what they do and likes helping us succeed.

In-person training is more ad-hoc based on if they are traveling to you or you are going to visit them. I imagine that if I paid for in-person training that it would be set up as well, but I've just used the standard training that comes with the initial set up and ongoing support.

Online training is through online webinar & how-to posts and videos in the client community.

Don't forget about customer service once you have a closed the sale with a customer. Oracle seemed to not care about our needs/timeline after we gave them our Purchase Order

Incentivized

We had staff turnover at our own organization during the implementation. We were able to get the community up and live in a good timeframe even though that happened and we had to switch some people around for managing the project on our side.

While OCM was a lot more money, they were able to prove to us that they are a much better solution to use and worth the extra cost. The reporting, capabilities along with the analytics that was easy to download was a big discussion factor for us.

Incentivized

We evaluated a few different community platform vendors over the course of a couple of months. I believe we also evaluated Jive, Lithium, KickApps, and Powered.

• Everyone had their own plan and executed them without taking into consideration the impact of another ongoing project. Compendium has created communication between teams that were not communicating before.

Incentivized

• Our community has been very active since the re-launch of our site. Have seen some increases in member engagement.
• Feedback from our membership has been nothing but positive since we transitioned off of our older Sharepoint community. Look and feel and ease of use have been real pluses for our members.
• Having the Small World Labs community is allowing us to be more creative with the way we integrate our community into all aspects of our online presence, web-site, social media, etc.