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We never realized how powerful and useful Bloomfire was until they took it away from us.
March 01, 2021

We never realized how powerful and useful Bloomfire was until they took it away from us.

Dave Cavanaugh | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Bloomfire

The Franchisor has decided to discontinue use of Bloomfire and use FranConnect instead. When Bloomfire was in use, it was the corporate knowledge base and repository for E-Learning, Articles, Information and Community Q&A/support.
  • Allows thousands of individuals to collaborate by sharing questions & answers in a moderated social network.
  • Provides reasonable groupings of like content in common groups.
  • Bubbles to the top the most important or most viewed posts.
  • Allows Corporate facilitation and rotating top banner with most important content.
  • Provides, when organized into series, a sequential set of links to content.
  • Ability to leave bookmarks.
  • Search was awful.
  • If you were not subscribed to a given group, a link (provided by someone else) to content in that group would not work.
  • Information Organization was very basic and could have been more useful.
  • It was not easy to find answers to questions that may have been asked before, so the same questions were asked again and again because it was too difficult to find previous answers.
  • If you subcribed to multiple groups and chose to have updates emailed, your email became overwhelmed and the information being sent was not useful.
  • Inability to organize bookmarks into something more useful than a big list.
  • Ability to find information has plummeted since they discontinued Bloomfire.
  • Ability of employees to find their own answers has plummeted since they discontinued Bloomfire.
  • Employee engagement has plummeted since they discontinued Bloomfire.
  • Employee and manager discontent has skyrocketed since they discontinued Bloomfire.

Do you think Bloomfire delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with Bloomfire's feature set?

Yes

Did Bloomfire live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Bloomfire go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Bloomfire again?

No

I was not involved in selection
The system that the corporation has decided to replace Bloomfire with (FranConnect) is downright horrible. They flushed 5+ years worth of knowledge and eliminated the ability of associates to ask and answer questions from across the network. For as bad as the organizational structure was in Bloomfire, FranConnect (or the way they have implemented it) is far worse. I believe the issue is that when the number of Bloomfire users gets large, there needs to be a significant investment in moderation and curation/re-structuring of posts & knowledge to keep the system useful. Without regular pruning, archiving, and moderation, the system's organic growth makes it too difficult to find what's needed quickly without a superior search mechanism.

Using Bloomfire

ProsCons
Like to use
Technical support not required
Consistent
Quick to learn
Familiar
Cumbersome
  • Find things that you have seen before.
  • Viewing content as a series if you know to view it that way.
  • Clicking on content provided as most important at the top of the main page.
  • Search.
  • Lack of structure allows so much organic growth that the system is hindered by it's own popularity.
  • If you don't understand groups and group subscriptions, you are out of luck.
  • Mosaic display of posts is pretty but not very useful as quantity of content overwhelms the user's ability to find what they need.
Yes - I could never figure out how to use the mobile interface effectively and I'm an IT guy and tech nerd.