Tasty mango... but not fully ripe yet.
Rating: 6 out of 10
February 20, 2018
Vetted Review
Verified User
1 year of experience
MangoApps allows us to connect people from the whole company located in remote sites. It adds a social dimension that cannot be achieved with the use of e-mail alone. People can discover other people with the same interest, can share content, ask questions, submit polls, and react to content posted by other people (liking, answering and commenting it). A wiki module allows people to contribute to a shared documentation base.
- MangoApps provide a large number of options to interact within a community. People can post updates, ask questions, create polls, quizzes, wiki, surveys, chats, or forms.
- The Web interface is a modern application (Facebook inspired). The navigation (although not the most efficient) is overall quite intuitive.
- MangoApps has a web interface, and apps for desktop (Windows, Mac), and mobile.
- MangoApps features a centralized notification system. Unread messages are notified from the Web app, the mobile, or the desktop app. The synchronization status is synchronized.
- MangoApps integrates with Active Directory.
Cons
- The notification system in the desktop app is not informative enough. Some notifications are shown without any context (for example we sometimes just see "Yes" or "No"), and it's difficult to understand the context (in our case the original question).
- Messages posted in a big chat group (in our case more than 15k people) make the app crash.
- HipChat does not support animated GIFs (they just appear static).
- It's not easy to post transversal questions or updates across groups. A lot of content needs to end in a unique group, losing some opportunity to reach a wider audience.
- A gamification system is available (people can earn points and badges by completing some actions), but the reward system is quite obscure. As a result, many of us do not feel compelled to gain more badges. It feels like as if we're earning badges randomly.
- MangoApps opened new communication channels between people who would not have naturally communicated before with e-mail alone
- MangoApps is slowly helping move some communications away from the private e-mail channels into a more opened and public channel, more easily archivable. However, it might take years before we see a majority of discussions happening here.
- As any introduction of a new tool, MangoApps also disrupted the usages and common practices. Some people had being using their own social tools, and some other were already using e-mail as a social tool. Took some time before the usage of MangoApps rose enough to be mildly useful.
- Workplace by Facebook (Formerly Facebook at Work)
Although, Facebook at Work featured a very modern interface and was praised by many of the beta testers, we primarily didn't choose Facebook at Work due to data security reasons.