Novell Vibe the beauty and the beast.
Updated October 13, 2015

Novell Vibe the beauty and the beast.

Rob Zweistra | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

3.4

Overall Satisfaction with Micro Focus Vibe

We are in the process of testing Novell Vibe to be used for the entire organisation. For this we have to test two parts. The landing pages, corporate wide and for users individually. The second part is implementing forms and workflows to automate some processes in order to make them more paper-friendly. We have a distinct division between office and work floor. As the company is project driven Novell Vibe would be a good choice and we have the full Novell suite so it will also be linked in with our Novell GroupWise mail environment.
  • Novell Vibe connects GroupWise mail with Vibe natively which means you can access Vibe from within the mail product.
  • Once forms and workflows are set up, the access structure on who sees what or not is very effective.
  • You can use Novell Vibe as your main intranet with everything from wiki's, blogging and more fully automated and still in synch with your internal organisational structure.
  • After playing with it for a while i found that through jsp it is highly configurable.
  • Having build lot of websites over the years this is one of the most user unfriendly systems I [have] run across. The learning curve is very steep and a lot of stuff is not findable on the internet.
  • The Java used under water has some quirks that makes working with the interface almost undoable. If you make a tree and you change something in that tree it is completely reset to the top level every time so the workflow is broken constantly.
  • There is no copy option in the tool which is strange as 80% of the things you build is the same or similar with minor adjustments like a different color code. Like the previous remark this makes the workflow constantly interrupted.
  • The learning curve for a regular user is also a little too steep. They can do too much and it goes beyond the daily things they need to do with it. To configure Novell Vibe so that the user is protected from doing or seeing too much is a lot of work which means you will have to hire an FTE to manage Novell Vibe alone.
  • Because the end product depends on the use of jsp pages a lot it requires you to hire a specialist with a big salary-tag to build it for you. once it is up and running changes will be very dependant on the guy you hired to build it!
  • The testing has provided us with a lot of wasted time in figuring out how it works even with the original manuals.
  • If we were to implement it in the real environment we would like to see a lot of improvements.
  • We have to invest more time to convince management that this tool is the way to go. We hope that Novell Vibe 4.0 has the improvements we are waiting for.

As SharePoint is the Microsoft version of this tool it is fair to use it for comparison. The one thing Microsoft has as an advantage is that it is a Microsoft product hence it looks and feels familiar instantly and getting it up and running is fairly easy. The price however is a different matter.

Also I am looking at WordPress at the moment this gives me an opportunity to build a similar site and with the help of some plugins I can make it a share your documents, tasks and more site. Advantage is that WordPress is free, it is installed in minutes and with the correct themes I have it up and running in the business within days. Also the learning curve for me is flat I don't need to learn as much as with Novell Vibe to get the results I want. Does it work with Outlook and GroupWise ? Maybe!

  1. How fast can I implement it fully for an organisation?
  2. How many hours must I invest to get it up and running?
  3. How does it compare to the competitors similar software?
  4. Once up and running how much time and money will it cost me?

From the point of how it looks I would like to use it. As it is part of the Novell suite I would like to use it as I have already paid for it. So in conclusion with the help of Novell I might be able to implement it the way I want it but without extra cost.

OpenText Vibe Feature Ratings

Evaluating Micro Focus Vibe and Competitors

  • Price
  • Product Features
It is part of the novell suite we have so it would be a waste not to use it!

Micro Focus Vibe Implementation

The implementation was good, it is the follow up that we need to do ourselves that takes time and effort.
Change management was minimal

Using Micro Focus Vibe

At this moment it still looks you need to do a lot to be able to use it and to be honest that time should be used for work not for configuring a communication tool for the business. Yes I understand that it takes time to learn something to use in the organisation , but with this tool I see the help desk having to answer a lot of questions on how to use it or once someone has done something how to undo it.
ProsCons
Like to use
Unnecessarily complex
Difficult to use
Slow to learn
Cumbersome
Lots to learn
  • Intergation of microsoft office by adding a vibe button in office was a nice feature