Sococo vs. TIBCO Tibbr

We tried Sococo as means of gamifying a natively remote office. It does the job but the tool suffers from a lack of integrations. You will run out of free minutes very quickly and the additional charges are too high to make business sense.

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.

Incentivized

• Visual layout - the virtual office visible was very helpful because it made the organization feel closer and as a whole, much more connected. Further, you can group departments in your layout, so it gave a good visual understanding of who was part of each 'department/team.'
• Sound - the sound quality was good overall in meetings, and I liked the realistic sounds for opening and closing an office, etc. It allowed for a real office feel, and this is especially important since a lot of companies offer the option to work from home now - this removes the 'disconnect' that usually exists when working from home.
• Communication options - it allowed for multiple ways to communicate and places to communicate - i.e., in the auditorium, lunchroom, conference room, or a smaller room. Very realistic and a variety in that sense.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• It would be great if it supported other major browsers. Not everyone has Chrome installed.
• The ongoing subscription cost is difficult to justify. This is the only reason we stopped using it.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

It was easy to use but still needs lots of improvement to collaborate with other tools

Incentivized

Sococo didn't seem to have a strong support line. In comparison to other products, such as Microsoft Teams, it did not regularly check in with us. There should be opportunities to give feedback on the quality of the program periodically and if we had any issues. Sometimes, Sococo would crash, and we would 'restart it' but not know why it happened.

Incentivized

I prefer Sococo over Lync/Skype for a few reasons. I feel the user interface is slicker, better voice clarity, easier to hop between calls. And, all call members can go to a common chat room on their own accord instead of one person trying to invite everybody. I also feel that it's easier to share one's screen and swap between different shared screens with Sococo.

Incentivized

• Morning meetings are much simpler with sococo than without. Small powwows with coworkers to work out little bugs are also a lot more enticing since setup is essentially nonexistent.
• It might be argued that the cost of sococo isn't worth the benefits of simplicity and ease of use.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized