Overall Satisfaction with Micro Focus Vibe
- 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!
OpenText Vibe Feature Ratings
Evaluating Micro Focus Vibe and Competitors
- Price
- Product Features
Micro Focus Vibe Implementation
- Vendor implemented
Using Micro Focus Vibe
Pros | Cons |
---|---|
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