Bonterra ETO vs. Nuxeo

I can see from an education perspective how it would be an incredible fit. The functionality is all there and growing. From a CAC perspective, it's still a work in progress, especially for larger CACs where lots more services are provided and the lines between programs blur a bit more. I think that ETO is becoming more user-friendly for CACs and Social Solutions is moving in the right direction too. I can't wait for some of the new features to roll out and be able to use them in our system. I really do think that will improve our user experience significantly.

Incentivized

I like to describe Nuxeo as getting you 90% of the way to wherever you want to go, but 100% of the way to nowhere. This 10% allows flexibility to add your own custom business rules and operations. This is different than a complete off-the-shelf solution that provides 100% of a solution but does not give you the flexibility that you need. If you want a platform that can adjust to your needs, use Nuxeo. If you are looking for a turnkey solution that will get you off the ground 100 % of the way out of the gate, other options may be better for you.

Incentivized

• ETO captures the variety of data that can give us more ways to understand what is happening with the participants we serve.
• Participant dashboards are customizable and can be very helpful for direct service providers in serving their participants.
• The referral system within ETO allows us to make easier referrals between programs and track how often that occurs.
• It doesn't take a strong technical person to set up programs and other pieces within ETO.

Incentivized

• The platform has Lots of option to protect assets, review and share with the required people.
• It provides a seamless transition from SharePoint which is extremely useful for our business as we have tons of data stored on SharePoint.
• It is a powerful tool, especially for searching - since the indexing is super fast unlike other platforms.

Incentivized

• ETO needs to be mobile friendly because a lot of our staff do outreach work, including all touchpoints, demographics, enrollments, and dashboards on their phone.
• Too many ways to get to the same thing. E.g. Add New Participant Tab, Add New Participant in Navigation Bar, Add New Participant on Home Page, etc. This generates mistakes and a need for very thorough training and tight oversight.
• Inability to remove touchpoints from custom universes once they have already been added. There is a limit of 20 touchpoints per custom universe. If the touchpoints in a universe have become obsolete or irrelevant, there is no way to make room for a new, more relevant touchpoint. Old touchpoints can be disabled but not removed.
• Need to pay extra for email and calendar notifications. This should be a built-in function, as the software already costs a lot, and many organizations cannot afford to spend more to get this vital functionality.
• It would be great if a "Case Conference" chat feature could be attached to participants. Case managers could enter the chat room and relay important information about the participant to each other. This could also work when people aren't there in real time, like emails. The important part is that all of this information would be accessible UNDER the participant's profile or dashboard that it's regarding.

Incentivized

• Public documentation - it has some + public forums, but we felt more is needed
• Back-end management - the web UI is fancy, but it sometimes translates to some tough to understand implementations
• Starting sequence of on-premise installations - Java gibberish in the logs; sifting is required to identify real issues from acceptable ones
• No built-in monitoring and performance alerting

Incentivized

Social Solutions has been great for our organization. It has allowed us to not only report on data, but to dive into it to see trends and give snapshots of the current status of our neighbors. Social Solutions has been helpful in getting us to see additional ways we can use our data and ways that it is easier for front line staff to use this tool

Incentivized

6 years of experience dealing with a poor interface, unreliable reports, and broken promises with virtually zero improvements. I have too many issues to list but have an entire file if anyone ever shows interest from a site Manager. I listed some of the issues in some of the first questions in this review and I appreciate the opportunity to share my experiences.

Nuxeo provides a
WebUI that they are always improving based on customer feedback. The interface is designed with flexibility in
mind - this means that it must be customized to the business's use case before
it can achieve its maximum usability.

The Nuxeo Studio
interface provides developers and administrators the building blocks to achieve
much of this customization - they just need to put the building blocks together
in ways that best meet the end users' needs.
The API and SDKs allow for more advanced customization.

Incentivized

Routine maintenance is announced with plenty of lead time, and the few times I've been unable to log in to the system properly a simple refresh was all that was required to fix.

Incentivized

Mostly really strong now, although I understand that for some years before switching their hosting service to AWS performance was a real issue with ETO and we had frequent problems with pages timing out or other glitches stemming from performance issues. With AWS that is mostly a thing of the past, although it is still a major issue with the reporting tool which is unable to run reports on the entire database due to performance limitations, instead requiring admins to define universes prior to running queries.

Incentivized

To be very honest: as far as we have used it, we have found it to be one of the best tools. The document repository and the speed of searches are amazing. With it, we are able to enhance scalability, and the basic usage of it is in digital asset management, and it has been helpful in content management, too.

We love the first tier customer support folks! They're friendly, helpful, and knowledgeable within the scope of their position. The experiences we've had with their supervisors have also been mostly good and again they seem to be doing what they can within the scope of their positions. This is what prevents me from selecting 1. Unfortunately, none of these wonderful folks can offer real solutions when things are actually broken. They verify there's a problem and send it to the black hole called "the developers". After that, we don't hear anything useful and we figure out how to live with/work around the problem ourselves. (Requests for updates typically get "still with the developer" responses.) This is highly frustrating given that most of our issues are basic system issues (functionality that worked then broke after an update by Social Solutions, servers not syncing, report universes not flattening automatically, etc.). All we want is for the system to work as designed and to be fixed in a timely fashion when it doesn't. Apparently, that's too much to ask. (And no, we don't expect it to happen instantly, programming and quality control checks obviously take time.)

Incentivized

Nuxeo support is very willing to help whenever there is an issue. We have a weekly touchbase with someone from the Nuxeo team that we discuss any development issues with, and there is an open line of communication between our team and the Nuxeo team. They have been supporting us phenomenally, every step of the way.

Incentivized

I attended instructor-led trainings at a couple of points when I was first beginning to serve as project manager on Nuxeo projects. The first one that I attended was meant for business users and decision-makers. The second one was meant for system administrators. The first one provided a great introduction, through demos, of how Nuxeo could be adapted to very different business use cases. The second one, like many instructor-led trainings, was meant for users of a variety of skill levels, and so it could be a bit slow at times for students with a stronger technical background, but the instructor was able to include more advanced components as well.

Incentivized

Really good trainer and exhaustive curriculum covered, but ETO is a complex enough system that you don't *really* know how to use it until you've been in the trenches for a few weeks. For instance, I took a Report Writing training and emerged with some fluency in the reports interface and a vague understanding of the process, but immediately encountered a legion of instance-specific idiosyncrasies that would have been totally impossible to address in a webinar training for a dozen folks from different orgs working in different instances.

Incentivized

Nuxeo University provides an ideal starting point for developers and system administrators who are new to the Nuxeo platform. So, in terms of online training for developers and administrators, the learning paths are definitely available. In terms of training for end users: keep in mind that Nuxeo is a foundation with building blocks - what you do with those building blocks is up to you and depends on your business's specific use cases. For this reason, end-user training is largely up to you because it will need to depend on how you've built and configured the system. That said, I've seen the companies that I've worked with configure the system based largely on end-user input, and so it has fit very closely with what those users wanted to do and how they wanted to do it. In cases where elements of the UI weren't fitting quite right with what users naturally wanted to do, based on their process flows, we've often found it easy enough to adapt the UI to the users, rather than using training to adapt the users to the UI.

Incentivized

Hard to say, as I was not with the agency at the time. However, based on our use of the software ~5years later I can say that there were no catastrophic design choices made during implementation that have become unduly burdensome as we've scaled up.

Incentivized

I worked with a Nuxeo employee who helped design the initial architecture and implementation for our specific use case. It was helpful to have an individual who knew the system and how we could best utilize it. We have since made lots of adjustments, but the basic architecture is still in place.

Incentivized

We originally built our program around SharePoint and were dissatisfied by the lack of transparency it provided. We then moved to ETO, primarily because it was the cheapest of the other solutions that we looked at. Now, we are realizing that we are not getting any real value from our ETO system, so we will likely be investing in a more sophisticated system.

Incentivized

Nuxeo is far and away more flexible and mature for managing digital assets than the others. It was chosen as a platform that would allow us to work as we need to without starting from scratch and leverage reusable code modules and other best practices.

Incentivized

The core product scales well, and we've grown quite a bit as an agency during our use of ETO. However, there are some real pain points particularly around creating new programs and managing report universes that require extensive offline checklist resources and a full-spectrum understanding of how changing settings in one part of ETO can have downstream impact in other areas. This can introduce a "chilling" effect on proposed changes to the system, where there is strong incentive to leave things as-is to avoid unforeseen consequences.

Incentivized

• It has saved us time in terms of putting together reports for internal use and for external funders.
• Better accountability for gathering information.
• Given the monthly cost of the system we are probably paying too much but the cost of switching to another piece of software doesn't quite justify a move yet.

Incentivized

• It is an open source tool hence proves to be an excellent ROI. Content and document management are managed very well in the tool.
• Security and role based features play a major role. Migration is a breeze. Hence it is a very positive impact.
• Nuxeo has very rich feature set but its complex enough and so developers needs considerable time to ramp up on development on this platform .

Incentivized