New Enterprise Social Software Reviews 2017

How do enterprise social solutions facilitate better collaboration among employees within an organization?

In their latest enterprise social software reviews, IT Central Station users discuss matters such as documentation features, integration capabilities, scalability, and the conduciveness to communication among their organizations’ employees -- both within and between departments.

Continue reading to find out what users really think about Liferay Digital Experience Platform, Yammer, Drupal, Slack, and IBM Connections.

Liferay Digital Experience Platform

 Victor De Lima Soares, Head Developer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees, writes about his favorite Liferay Digital Experience Platform features:

“The ability to control web content within a structured version system and its unique capability to receive extension modules and plugins. The extension power makes this software a great ally for building new systems.

I usually see this platform as a Swiss Army Knife for building new features. I also see it as a starting point for assembling new systems from modules and apps, just like we do when playing with Lego blocks.

Support for Java 8 and OSGi are also extremely attractive capabilities.” 

Søren Norman Pedersen, Senior IT Technical Specialist at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees, points out a need for improved documentation capabilities: 

“Documentation is an issue and needs to be improved. Asset publishing can be a bit complicated, but once you have some running, it gets easier.”

Yammer

An IT Director at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees shares how Yammer has improved his company’s communication methods:

• External collaboration with partners: There is a unified way to send updates about departments and the enterprise, rather than sending separate communications.

• Inbox and notification for updates: This helps to manage messaging to stakeholders in a centralized and contextual way, rather than silo information sharing.messaging to stakeholders in a centralized and contextual way, rather than silo information sharing.

• Integration with Microsoft Office feeds: Since the enterprise works with Office, it is easy to use along with those tools.
  

Nick DeAngelo, Director at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees, writes about Yammer’s need for “a more defined roadmap”; 

“It just needs a more defined roadmap. Yammer is part of Office 365 and the whole platform is ever evolving, and new features show up sometimes unannounced, and you don't find out until one of your end users mentions it.”

Drupal

Andrii Shutov, Drupal developer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees, describes Drupal’s added value to his organization: 

“Its scalability, content management practices, security and the community are valuable features.

The product is very well-supported. Every day, the Drupal community all over the world posts new updates along with the bug fixes and security updates. So, the product is getting better and better each day.

After many years of development (it has already reached version 8), Drupal gets great content management schemes and processes. Data is well-structured and controlled from any part of the code.

In the case of the required changes in some part of the functionality, you can apply changes without rewriting the features from scratch.”

Ilias Dimopoulos, Drupal Web Developer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees, writes about what can be further improved in Drupal: 

“Drupal is now on a constant release flow that will continue aiming to improve. The community itself has improved quite a lot as well in terms of numbers and quality of code.

I am not saying that Drupal is perfect, it is far from perfect, but the community as an open source organization is improving constantly. Even the front end development of Drupal, which was always a weak point, has improved greatly in Drupal 8 using the twig system to easily create templates.”

Slack

Kevin Glynn, Data Science Consultant at a tech services company with 11-50 employees describes how Slack helps his organization increase effectiveness through better collaboration with remote employees: 

“Slack kept several remote employees working cohesively and seamlessly together, allowing us to more easily synchronize our efforts and work collaboratively rather than "islands unto ourselves," so to speak. Coding, writing, editing, etc. was all done in an effective manner, as a result.” 

An Editorial Director at a media company with 501-1,000 employees hopes to see Slack cater more of its functionality to non-technical users (non-developers): 

“Many of the advanced features and integrations are built with developers in mind. More functionality and integration for other use cases would be welcome.

Slack integrates with bots that automate tasks and add functionality. A large portion of these bots do things specifically to help developers do their jobs, such as accessing code repositories and sharing code with colleagues.

It would be great if there were more bots and third-party integrations that targeted other groups of potential Slack users.”

IBM Connections

Rajesh Ravella, Senior Analyst - Messaging & Mobility at a construction company with 1,001-5,000 employees, describes how IBM Connections adds value to the team collaboration and communication at his company:

“Communities and activities are very useful for team collaboration and project-level communication. This prevents breakdowns and keeps all the information in a centralized location. 

It has helped us to lean towards social business, instead of just using emails as a primary mode of communication.”

Enzo Stanzione, Social Business Advisor at a tech services company with 51-200 employees, suggests improvements that could further improve IBM Connections:

“The improvements are more flexibility to manage files and to have a sync file area more intuitive and which respects the characteristics of other similar solutions. That feature should be also only for personal files.”

Read more of the most recent enterprise social software reviews on IT Central Station.

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