Bonterra ETO

Formerly ETO by Social Solutions

It has all the earmarks of being a company with low staff turnover and steady individuals to chat with.

We use it every day to deliver things for buying and checking verifiable costs of segments.

I would make a more granular client organization plot.

A portion of the passage techniques resembles an information base versus a bookkeeping page.

The main dashboard page/portal is attractive in color and font design.

Honestly I'm really trying to be fair, but there is nothing this software does particularly well from the users standpoint.

Some of the support staff have been responsive over the years.

Still waiting for a seamless connection with SOMS (Strategic Offender Management System which is CDCR's main software for the State). We have been promised these two systems would speak to each other, but there has been zero progress in 6 years, and locally, ETO blames SOMS which is not helpful since SOMS is robust and functional unlike ETO-ARMS. Human manual entry of data dumps has been the "solution".

The interface is far from friendly or intuitive. It also has serious functionality issues. It requires multiple duplication and excessive clicks for data entry (ex: entering the same date multiple times, not showing pertinent required info on the same screen, not remembering last entries and ERASING previous data entered when entering new data, using different terms for the same action, disallowing some corrections, not speaking to itself on basic logic - like having to enroll an individual profile just so you can tell the software to un-enroll him in 3 different fields etc). Another big problem is the reports generator cannot be trusted as the data is often wrong or dated (perhaps because it requires data from SOMS which speaks a different language).They don't understand how to filter previous entries and terms, so the coding is probably defective or misunderstood at the root. This is taxpayer funded programming that the state legislature requires for budget decisions. Entry touchpoints have fundamental basic flaws and reports are basically garbage. We have so many examples of issues...too many to list here. 2-3 years ago a team was set up to assess contract renewal with ETO, and despite multiple examples of problems submitted, we have zero progress, the team was disbanded and the contract renewed.

I understand that the issues we are dealing with may have more to do with the way our product was customized for California, and not necessarily the software's inherent capabilities, but either way, the ARMS part of ETO has become somewhat of a running joke. Even an ARMS support Manager admitted to me that ARMS "sucks". In my honest opinion the entire ARMS suite should be trashed and rebuilt with consultations from actual users. It is costing countless man-hours of lost productivity and employee frustration. Sorry but we have been dealing with these problems for years.

ETO does well with collecting our data and allowing us to see where we can improve in our mission services.

ETO by Social Solutions does well with responding to issues or concerns with the use of the software and they have very friendly customer support representatives.

ETO by Social Solutions provides our organization with the tools we need to track the successes of our individuals as they progress along the path to employment.

ETO by Social Solutions could improve on the availability of free basic training for new users.

ETO by Social Solutions could definitely improve upon its Help Manual. The search engine is not very intuitive and often returns results that are unnecessary.

Lots of customization available

Clean design

Frequent performance issues.

Many features feel 'grafted' on without a full scope consideration of how they could be best integrated into the existing interface. The result is a congested array of settings UIs that require the primary user to develop and maintain workflow checklists off of the site itself.

Reporting tool has numerous performance and design flaws.

The ability to design touchpoints and reports is very powerful with ETO

ETO support services is another strength they are extremely helpful when you have issues

ETO is continuously improving on the product which gives us more ability to improve

Would love for them to have a module for HUD Housing Counseling

ETO's customization allows for the use of so many different and unique applications.

The ability to build extremely customized reports also allows us to get very detail oriented results or very broad building wide stats.

The additional added features such as workflow, referrals, and ETO Engage are useful in their own way and add more ways to better track and record data while simplifying some end-user processes.

ETO can be a bit clunky. Lots of added unnecessary clicking. I'm hoping the new UI will bring it up to speed.

ETO Results is built on the SAP BO Web platform and although it's one of the best reporting engines out there for customization, it provides little to no feedback by comparison to other reporting platforms in terms of error checking and predictive text, which with such a complicated system, would be really helpful.

ETO customization is awesome, but there is a need to add some more functionality to building out TouchPoints and creating questions and conditionals. The process is long and cumbersome when compared to any other form builder, even the more complex ones.

I like the dashboard.

The new touch points, but haven't had much of a chance to use them.

Reporting.

The ability to have assessments on one page as opposed to separate tabs.

The administration of user accounts is easy to learn and manage.

Creating touchpoints is relatively straightforward.

The chat feature for help/support is really useful.

The user interface is not intuitive and exceptionally difficult for non-tech savvy people to learn.

The system is not as customizable as we were led to believe at the initial purchase.

The system does not interface well with other systems. Organizationally we are moving towards data integration, and we will likely replace ETO because of this limitation.

Considering the limitations of the system, the cost is quite high. We've seen only marginal benefits of this system over pen and paper, and the ROI is not promising.

The initial build process was very frustrating. We didn't understand what the developer was billing us for. Something like simple touchpoint forms was billed for more hours than it would seem to require.

A system like this should be both fully mobile compatible and have offline functionality.

We would benefit from more nuanced security settings.

Custom reporting allows for almost unlimited reporting options.

The ability to create your own touchpoints means you can capture any data point you wish.

Available webinar training sessions for administrators and reporting training.

Still not browser neutral (requires Internet Explorer)

Almost too much customization involved in reporting and administration. Definitely requires a dedicated admin to effectively use this software in the organization.

High turnover in the account manager and customer relations team.

Allows our users a place to report their daily activities with our neighbors

Allows our agency to have data to drive decisions in staffing, programming, and expansion

Allows our agency to share our work with funders, donors, and staff

Allow our agency to dive deeper into data to identify trends in population and services

Staff reports that sometime it is not easy to use when trying to do multiple data entry points with neighbors during the same visit

I would like to see an easier way to create reports using the legacy platform

Customizing reports for export to other databases

Easy data entry

Quick reports

Report writing is super tricky. I struggle with writing them even though I've taken classes.

Some times previous data sets can be difficult to access.

Customer Service

Results Training

Tracking several clients who may be involved in more than one program

User Interface

Increased assistance with transitioning from outdated features to new features

More advanced classes in results

ETO is good in capturing the variety of data that can give us more ways to understand what is happening with the participants we serve.

The referral system within ETO allows us to make easier referrals between programs and track how often that occurs, tracking the follow up in consultation etc.

Participant dashboards are customization and can be very helpful for direct service providers in serving their participants.

Customer service has gotten a little better recently, but overall our experience up to this point has been pretty bad .Turn around on issues is really bad and sometimes takes forever to get a resolution.

No proper documentation or manuals available.

Training is not free even if you pay tons of $$ for software.

Excellent report building platform. Very versatile.

Highly customizable user interface; a lot of flexibility in form building and dashboards.

Tracks all the right things - demographics, forms, enrollments, duplicates. Well made for case management.

ETO needs to be mobile friendly because a lot of our staff do outreach work, including all touchpoints, demographics, enrollments, and dashboards on their phone.

Too many ways to get to the same thing. E.g. Add New Participant Tab, Add New Participant in Navigation Bar, Add New Participant on Home Page, etc. This generates mistakes and a need for very thorough training and tight oversight.

Inability to remove touchpoints from custom universes once they have already been added. There is a limit of 20 touchpoints per custom universe. If the touchpoints in a universe have become obsolete or irrelevant, there is no way to make room for a new, more relevant touchpoint. Old touchpoints can be disabled but not removed.

Need to pay extra for email and calendar notifications. This should be a built-in function, as the software already costs a lot, and many organizations cannot afford to spend more to get this vital functionality.

It would be great if a "Case Conference" chat feature could be attached to participants. Case managers could enter the chat room and relay important information about the participant to each other. This could also work when people aren't there in real time, like emails. The important part is that all of this information would be accessible UNDER the participant's profile or dashboard that it's regarding.

ETO gives us easy access to our data.

ETO is user-friendly to users entering data.

ETO offers us flexibility in customizing the product for use that makes sense to us.

I'd like to see it compatible with more browsers.

We are required to enter data into HMIS (service point) by HUD. We want to move towards having all our data in ETO, but don't want to ask staff to enter data twice. Ideally, we would do all our data entry into ETO and have the system share required elements with HMIS.

Many of the features are standard throughout the software, but occasionally things look different. I'd like to see more standardization.

ETO captures the variety of data that can give us more ways to understand what is happening with the participants we serve.

Participant dashboards are customizable and can be very helpful for direct service providers in serving their participants.

The referral system within ETO allows us to make easier referrals between programs and track how often that occurs.

It doesn't take a strong technical person to set up programs and other pieces within ETO.

The interface can be a bit clunky, especially the interface for navigating the setup forms for creating programs, touchpoints, setting security, etc. Way too many clicks and confusing workflows and terminology.

Lack of up-to-date documentation for administering the system.

Customer service has gotten a little better recently, but overall our experience up to this point has been pretty bad. And along those lines our implementation experience was awful.

ETO reports allows you to pull your data in many ways so that you can align different data points, look at data over time, or at one point in time. I haven't encountered a data collection and reporting system that is as robust as what ETO currently offers.

Build custom assessments to collect data that are in alignment with your program model and/or services provided.

ETO is not user friendly for the novice user and visually it is not pleasing to the eye. This hinders the 'buy in' process.

There needs to be an online registration feature so that online accounts can be created and people can apply for certain programs and services. Also, to increase communication between providers and their clients.

ETO has a lot of bugs that cause it to stop working during the middle of using it. A lot of error messages. Most of the people using ETO are not researchers or data analysts. They are people that like to implement services with other people. Because their weakness is already data and systems anytime the system isn't working or has an issue (which is quite often) it really discourages them from using the system.

ETO is easy to navigate by site or by program

Setting up programs and creating touch points is relatively easy

The ability to email our clients through ETO would be beneficial

Batch uploads don't always function properly

The Social Solutions training academy for site administrators and report writers needs some work.

data entry

data management

reporting

dashboards

user experience/interface

reporting can be difficult, there's a learning curve

communication by the developer to clients

ETO's reporting support is very helpful and supportive. Quick responses to problems.

The reporting features allows many quick ways to see the results of our hard work.

The workflow option allows for easy and accurate data entry for all staff and volunteers.

Different options for pricing of bundles.

Different options for pricing of users.

ETO is a highly configurable system that easily allows change to existing, or new, data elements

Strategically utilizing add-ons to the ETO Platform has allowed increased automation and efficiency for the staff.

Social Solutions continues to innovate the ETO platform, with new features and functionality to improve the staff experience.

Changes to the User Interface have been overdue, but are already in the works to be updated soon.

It's fully customizable to meet our needs

Security settings allow us to protect participant data

Comprehensive data across all service areas

Some features load slowly

The user interface is outdated

Some desired changes take Social Solutions a long time to process, if at all

Being able to see dashboards for staff and each of the participants is great! It allows us to see at-a-glance information for each of the participants!

Grouping students into collections works great for us! It mirrors what we do in 'real life' and allows us to see groups of people at a time, rather than all participants in our 100+ participant program.

Customization has helped us tremendously! We are able to customize attendance values as well as custom demographic points that we want to track.

It takes a lot of training and understanding to be able to build a report for outputs or outcomes. Although it's improved its user interface and experience, it would be great to be able to do things 'simpler' when wanting to pull information out of the database.

ETO is customizable, even when a feature is deemed “limited” staff at Social Solution usually know a manageable work-around and keep the end user in mind.

ETO staff/support are honest about the systems capabilities. They know what features are “in-the-works” and are responsive to requests.

Frontline data entry folks need to be able to see and visualize their data. Color, visuals we need these things!

Referral system can be improved to have more response/follow-up once a referral is sent across sites.

ETO helps us track and standard data and custom data requirements give to us by our funders.

ETO Results, built on Business Objects, gives up powerful reporting to help us answer critical questions.

ETO listens to customer feedback in order to improve the software and make it more modern and user-friendly.

ETO has an outdated user interface us has recently announced plans for giving it a facelift.

ETO sells many add-ons which are very helpful but the extra cost can sometimes be a burden to non-profits.