ThoughtFarmer

Commenti: An easy to use Intranet portal with social capabilities that enable employees to be more engaged. Simplified infrastructure for on-premises, no need for massive server farms. Great setup and onboarding experience with their professional services team. Their support staff is stellar, fast and caring for your needs.

Vantaggi: ThoughtFarmer's ease of use, and the easy deployment on-premises (although a cloud option is available) helped us implement our new Intranet on time and budget while providing users with a top-notch experience for corporate news, events and navigating different processes in our organization. Social features (likes, commenting, @ mentions) really empower our employees to have a voice be more engaged with our strategic direction, operational insights and celebrating milestones with the recent addition of Shout-outs. From an extensibility perspective, the platform allows for page templates and widget creation (in browser or with modern development IDEs) and it is now based on React, so page loading and navigation is fast and responsive. Customizing with your own fonts. corporate color theme and images is quick and painless. Need to go a bit further? You can add your own CSS or JavaScript to fill in any gaps from the out of the box theming engine. A recent overhaul of the search experience brings the experience to what you would expect from enterprise search with the addition of best bets, predictive search, etc. The people directory is beautifully crafted and thanks to the Employee Directory Connector you can bring your users and their active directory properties (such as department, job title, phone, email) in just a few clicks. For authentication, SAML SSO is an option. The admin area is intuitive and very powerful as many options are configurable in the UI.

Inconvenienti: There are only 2 security roles, admin and user, so roles like help desk or others might get exposed to settings one might not want them to have. From an integration point of view, would like to see more integration with Office 365 as we use it for more day-to-day collaboration. A SharePoint integration is possible, but not sure if it will also work with SharePoint Online.

Commenti: We initially looked into ThoughtFarmer as a way to connect multiple offices and keep our entire company aware of corporate initiatives and news.

Vantaggi: After a bit of a learning curve, it's very easy to use as an administrator. Once you understand the concept of adding pages/forums/groups etc, everything is based on that concept. The search functionality is excellent and used extensively by our staff. Being able to give people access to different areas/content or message everyone/individual groups makes it a very useful tool for a multi-office company.

Inconvenienti: If there is anything I would suggest it would be to have more integration with MS Office documents. Being able to edit documents directly in the software would be great. But on the whole it's an extremely useful software!

Vantaggi: The software is super easy to use from an administration perspective. Not only is it easy for us in the IT Department, we've been able to train most of the management staff on how to run their own pages and make changes. Initial setup took some tweaking to make it our own but Thoughtfarmer support was very helpful whenever we had issues or needed suggestions. The modules themselves on the back-end are very customize-able and we've rarely needed anything besides the tools laid out for us by the software.

Inconvenienti: One of the only cons for our organization is that Thoughtfarmer had lacked any good form integration but it seems they improved this with the latest software release.

Commenti: Our company did not have any Intranet at all when we purchased ThoughtFarmer, so it was overwhelming to try to imagine how to sort and categorize all of our documentation. We utilized ThoughtFarmer's professional services to help us with it, and it was worth every penny!! They were so great to work this - their process is easy to follow and allowed us to get all of our staff involved. The results were a very logical and easy to follow Information Architecture that I'm not sure we would have ever gotten to without their help - certainly not in the time frame they made it happen in!!

Vantaggi: Using this software is like riding a bike - takes a little practice using all the different features, but once you've done it a bit, it's a piece of cake!! I don't have to go back to notes to remember how I made something work a certain way - it's all very logical and easy to do time and time again.

Inconvenienti: I guess what I liked least about the software is that it uses rich text editor which is a bit different from Word, so it took a little bit to get used to. But that's stretching trying to find something negative to say... lol

Commenti: The product is great and the support as well. Everyone I talk to is very professional and very responsive. I would definitely recommend it to others.

Vantaggi: Easy to use. It takes a few moments to get used to the card system. The administrative tools are great (especially with the new version 9)

Inconvenienti: If some0one leaves the company, we need to transfer the user's ownership to someone else. We don't always have the replacement right away. There is no way to know once the pages are transfered who it belonged to. There could maybe have a sort of history log as to who had the pages so that we could group them then transfer them to another person (maybe if someone changes departments and transfers them to another)