Likelihood to Recommend West Technology Group, LLC (formerly Intrado)
This is great for schools who want a bulk package of services at a competitive cost. Older website designs limit functionality and have a very square design. SchoolMessenger has more modern templates with newer capabilities which is better for visitors of the site. The functionality is great for parents who are accessing the site on the go, which happens more often than you know.
Read full review For companies that want to customize almost anything and make the forum look like your site, Vanilla Forums is the one for you. Customization and automation of the data via the API with other systems is more than possible and they serve to be great as a hosting provider, dealing with all the upgrades, deployments and maintenance and threat management well. I would say they might be less turn key for a small application but the fact they have an open source community, the ability to find help and information can lower the barrier of entry for most.
Read full review Pros West Technology Group, LLC (formerly Intrado)
Read full review Gamification: The ability to incentivise community members to get involved with ranks and badges is one of the main reasons that we purchased the tool. Support: The Vanilla support team are incredible, often responding to issues very late at night and proactively fixing issues as soon as they occur. Customisation: Vanilla can be completely styled with css allowing us to match it to the branding of the rest of our website. Read full review Cons West Technology Group, LLC (formerly Intrado)
There's nothing I dislike. This program is very straight forward to use. It just works well. Read full review There are some features I wish Vanilla would implement that could improve ease of use in our specific community, but some of the ideas we have are not necessarily something that would benefit all of the forums that Vanilla works with. In the past, we've had issues with releases breaking some of our specific site features they built for us, but this has improved drastically recently. Read full review Usability West Technology Group, LLC (formerly Intrado)
SchoolMessenger serves our main purpose of sending out emergency notifications and notices to parents. It is great to cut down on the paper use and the ability to attach documents to our notes. We have used this to send home notifications from our Parent-Teacher Organization. Parents have thanked us for sending a back ups due to papers being misplaced and knowing that they have a backup through email.
Read full review It is very intuitive and simple to operate. Our customers immediately came up with the curve and began contributing content.
Read full review Performance West Technology Group, LLC (formerly Intrado)
Overall, this is a good, effective, and cost-efficient product. It is missing some key functionality we had with a previous program which limits my total score, but I still think a lot of school districts can get a lot out of SchoolMessenger. The features and functions they do include work well.
Read full review Support Rating West Technology Group, LLC (formerly Intrado)
The support is fantastic. I have never had such complete support from a technology service. Every issue has been resolved while I was on the phone. I never had to wait for a callback or an advanced support tech. Their people are very well trained in their product and how to meet their customer's needs.
Read full review They did an amazing job transferring our content from GetSatisfaction. We had almost 100% success in the transfer of 8 years worth of content.
Read full review Alternatives Considered West Technology Group, LLC (formerly Intrado)
Easier to use and more cost effective than shoutpoint
Read full review From a footprint standpoint, Vanilla has less technical bloat than vbulletin or
InVision , and it outdoes
Lithium as far as features and service go. The bloat of other services and ability to use new ways of engaging communities such as through Reactions are part of the reason Vanilla was selected. However, the features are better on a couple more seasoned platforms and more equipped to deal with issues and technical problems.
Read full review Return on Investment West Technology Group, LLC (formerly Intrado)
Lost the confidence of families that we were protecting their data. Refused to refund our funds after they released confidential information. Required extensive resources to find another product. Read full review Increased uptime and overall speed in the forum (compared to our previous phpbb solution) Increased usage by users which resulted in a higher pages/session in a short amount of time Read full review ScreenShots Higher Logic Vanilla Screenshots