ENTERPRISE SOCIAL SOFTWAREcdn.ttgtmedia.com/downloads/Enterprise+Social+Software... ·...

© 2014 ITCentralStation.com Reproduction Prohibited To read more real user reviews about Enterprise Social Software, please visit: http://www.itcentralstation.com/category/enterprise-social-software

ENTERPRISE SOCIAL SOFTWARE

A PEEK INTO WHAT REAL USERS REALLY THINK

2014

IT Central Station helps enterprise tech professionals by providing

A comprehensive list of all enterprise social software

solutions.

Several real user reviews from enterprise tech

professionals and vendor information.

Specific information to help enterprise tech professionals

select the product that is right for their specific needs.

DISCLAIMER

IT Central Station Ltd. does not endorse or recommend any products or services. The views and opinions of reviewers quoted in this document, IT Central Station websites, and IT Central Station materials (i.e. Content) do not reflect the opinions of IT Central Station. We make no guarantees

about the accuracy, currency, suitability, or quality of the content, and we assume no responsibility for unintended, objectionable, inaccurate, misleading, or unlawful content made available by Content

authors or other third parties


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ABOUT THIS REPORT

This report is comprised of a comprehensive list of all enterprise level social software solutions. We have also included several real user reviews posted on ITCentralStation.com. The reviewers of these products have been validated as real users based on their LinkedIn profiles to ensure that they provide reliable opinions and not those of product vendors.


IMPORTANT NOTICE

Did you find this whitepaper helpful? At IT Central Station, our philosophy is “Give to Get”. Our active community and unbiased reviews are made possible by your participation and as such, we ask that you share your expertise with us as well. Please expect to be contacted shortly by an IT Central Station Community Manager. We will ask you for 10 minutes of your time to review a product that you use either via a 10 minute phone interview or questionnaire. You can choose to review anonymously or not and your company name will not be included in the review.

If you found this report and/or the reviews on IT Central Station useful, we would greatly appreciate your participation in giving back to our community.


VENDOR & PRODUCT LIST

V E N D O R P R O D U C T

Microsoft Yammer

Newsgator Social Sites

Atlassian Confluence

salesforce.com Chatter

MindTouch MindTouch

Microsoft SharePoint

Atlassian HipChat

Jive Jive

IBM Connections

Drupal Drupal

SAP StreamWork

Oracle Beehive

Atos blueKiwi

Adobe Day CQ5

EMC eRoom-CenterStage

Huddle Huddle

Igloo Igloo

INgage Networks INgage Networks Social Platform

BrightIdea Innovation Suite

KIT Digital KickApps

Liferay Liferay

IBM Lotus Quickr


IBM LotusLive

Mumba Cloud Mumba Cloud

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server

Mzinga OmniSocial

Demand Media Pluck

EPiServer Relate

SAP SAP Jam

OpenText Social Communities

Saba Social Enterprise

Ektron Social Marketing

VMware SocialCast

ONEsite SocialCore

Socialtext Socialtext

Moxie Software Spaces

Spigit Spigit

IntraLinks Technology Platform

Telligent Telligent

TIBCO tibbr

Novell Vibe

Oracle WebCenter

Cisco WebEx Social

WyseTalk WyseTalk


Confluence Vendor: Atlassian www.atlassian.com

REVIEW BY A REAL USER

Jonathan Klein Verified by IT Central Station Developer, Media Company with 500-5000 Employees

PROS

• It's relatively easy to use

• Has a lot of functionality with regard to formatting wiki articles and embedding content.

CONS

• The search is pretty terrible.

• You can search for something that is quite close to text that appears in an article, and nothing will come up.

• I consistently have a hard time finding the things I care about on our wiki.

SUMMARY

Overall it's a fine tool, but I don't think it provides a whole lot of advantages over other similar options. We use it primarily because we also use JIRA, and working with one vendor makes things easier.


Ross Cheetham Verified by IT Central Station Director of Operations, Cloud Provider with 1-500 Employees

PROS

• Great layout, easy to use, ticked all our feature requirements and a search function that was exactly what we were after!

• The WSIWYG editor used when creating pages / documents is amazing. With drag and drop ability for adding images and documents, as well as easy to use shortcuts.

• Excellent documentation area for users and admins alike.

SUMMARY

Since going live with Confluence we have started

WHAT REAL USERS ARE SAYING…

“ Decent Wiki Functionality, Awful Search.”

“Easy to use, but tough time importing Word.”

“Confluence 5 brings a fresh UI.”

“All the bits we needed plus more!”


using it quite heavily for our project documentation, internal tech support documentation and a large number of our team members are making great use of the persona spaces for their own notes, documents and general shenanigans.


OrenBA Verified by IT Central Station Training/Education, Media Company with 1-500 Employees

PROS

• It is very easy to use and setup.

• The Word import works well (except for styling issues).

• Users can collaborate and you can allow certain users to see certain content dynamically.

• Many plugins are offered. The most useful one is to generate PDF on the fly. You also have send this page, print, etc.

• If you do not require log-ins (only allow anonymous users), I would highly recommend Confluence.

CONS

• I had a tough time importing Word and allowing use of an external style sheet (and not import hard coded).

• Also, the pricing module needs to be adjusted.

• We want all our customers to be able to view Confluence as anonymous users. However, all our customers require a log in to our platform. And, to integrate with Confluence would require user licenses for every one of our users (over 10,000). It is not affordable.

•


SharePoint Vendor: Microsoft www.microsoft.com


Marwan Tarek Verified by IT Central Station Manager of Data Analytics, Tech Consulting Company with 1-500 Employees

SUMMARY

• The problem with SharePoint social is all or nothing.

• Some organizations don’t want to enable the personal sites but keep newsfeeds and follow!

• SharePoint social doesn’t have any alerting features. So when someone mentions you, you don’t receive any email and you have to check the news feed.

• No way of sending direct message like Twitter.

• I feel MS decided to stop in the middle of journey because of yammer acquisition.


Ian Hopkinson Verified by IT Central Station Data Expert, Tech Company with 1-500 Employees

PROS

• Sharepoint does feature some neat integration into Microsoft Office: viewing shared calendars in Outlook, saving directly to Sharepoint from office application but this facility is a bit flakey

CONS

• The file sharing/content management schizophrenia can lead to horrible websites, on a normal website you might expect that following a link in a page will take you seamlessly to another web page to be rendered in your browser. Not in Sharepoint: the siren voice of the file sharing side means that all to often website authors are going to link you to documents – so you hit a link and if you’re lucky you get asked whether you want to open a document in Microsoft Office, if you’re unlucky you get asked to enter your credentials first. Either way it breaks your expectation as to what a website should do: hit link – go to another webpage.


“The problem with SharePoint social is all or nothing.”

“Don’t invest in SharePoint social…”

“Why SharePoint Is So Popular, Yet Gets Such A Bad Rap.”

“My advice? Run (Hell, sprint!) away from Sharepoint for something more capable.”


• For every function you can imagine Sharepoint has a tick in the box: blogging, social media, wiki, discussion forums & version control. The problem is that whilst it nominally ticks these boxes it is uniformly awful at implementing them.

• For the technically minded part of the problem is the underlying product but part of the problem is down to how your company decides to implement Sharepoint.

SUMMARY

• Sharepoint suffers from trying to be a system to share documents and a system for making websites. It features a poor web interface for functionality, which could be integrated into the Windows file explorer.


Jive Vendor: Jive www.jivesoftware.com


jeffmurnan Verified by IT Central Station Business Analyst, Healthcare Company with 5000+ Employees

PROS

• We use it to get work done and we also use it to connect with our customers.

• Easy to use: there are so many tools that have great functionality but you need a PhD just to work it. Jive is incredibly simple and easy for anyone to pick up

• No hassle cloud hosting: you have the option of having Jive host your site, meaning they handle all server, maintenance, and databases

• Private communities: you can add security onto a community so that only the right people see key information

• Seamless document version control: we spend a lot of time in Microsoft Office and passing versions back and forth can be a pain. Jive’s Office plugin make is super easy to stay in sync with your colleagues

• Fast notifications with @ mentioning and activity feeds: you can setup customized activity feeds and @ mention colleagues so that they get notified right away


“We’ve been successful using the tool.”

“Solid product that is also extremely expensive.”


Yammer Vendor: Microsoft www.yammer.com


Mr. Beaudreaux Verified by IT Central Station Architect, Insurance company with 500-5000 Employees

PROS

• Yammer provides a simple to use, intuitive platform for enterprise collaboration within the social networking information model.

• Like other products in this space, Yammer takes a crowd-sourcing approach to knowledge management in the enterprise by allowing users to leverage powerful tagging and content collaboration tools to communicate and capture information and expertise.

CONS

• Yammer is not as feature rich as the most mature offering in this space, Jive, however it makes up for this with strikingly intuitive ease of use and a much lower cost.


“Not as feature-rich as Jive, but strikingly intuitive ease of use and a much lower cost.”

“Easy to use and widely adopted in our organization. Improvements could be made in the delayed messaging.”


Join the IT Central Station Community

This report features just a few of the enterprise social software reviews on IT Central Station. If you would like to read more about what real users are saying about the many Enterprise Social Software solutions on the market, visit the enterprise social software page at IT Central Station:

http://www.itcentralstation.com/category/enterprise-social-software

There are a number of ways you can participate in the IT Central Station community! Write a review, read a comment, or just follow a product. Either way, we’ll be sure to let you know when people are talking about the solutions you care about!

Give to Get

Did you find this whitepaper helpful? At IT Central Station, our philosophy is “Give to Get”. Our active community and unbiased reviews are made possible by your participation and as such, we ask that you share your expertise with us as well. Please expect to be contacted shortly by an IT Central Station Community Manager. We will ask you for 10 minutes of your time to review a product that you use either via a 10 minute phone interview or questionnaire. You can choose to review anonymously or not and your company name will not be included in the review.

If you found this report and/or the reviews on IT Central Station useful, we would greatly appreciate your participation in giving back to our community.

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