Centercode Connect is a hosted software platform that provides all of the tools needed to run a beta program: recruiting, NDA management, product distribution, surveys, bug reports, forums, reporting, and more.
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Jive-x (Discontinued)
Score 4.0 out of 10
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Jive-x (formerly Jive Engage) is Jive's external facing community platform for prospects and customers. It is a leading product in the space and most often competes with Lithium Community and Telligent Community.
The better question here is for the company themselves. How important is the quality of your product and your user experience? Instead of managing things via Google Docs, spreadsheets and email, how about have a portal which organizes feedback, provides a platform to complete end-to-end testings and create a community? Centercode is that solution.
Our version has some limits which have been overcome in newer releases of Jive with better workflow processes and plugins. It is clear that you need to be on the public cloud version as this will lower future costs however this limits you in terms of customization. So to make the case for a cloud version, you get the automatic upgrades with the upgrade costs attached to hosted versions
The Project Management style of logging tasks allows us to be nitty gritty with our beta testing
The ability to be able to cross check what other or similar items in the group captured adds value by visibly other issue similarity other testers captured
The ability to manage view access on a SSO config allows easy access only to those that are part of the actual beta testers on a "need to know" basis
Jive could do a better job of providing parity with its on-prem product in terms of features and in terms of making tiles on par with widgets. They basically quit developing for widgets and then stopped at a basic set of tiles.
Jive has some good health metrics built in, but the reporting tools need to be way more robust. It shouldn't require an API call to get information on which pages have the most likes or which customers have the most followers, or that sort of data. And they need to make the views/pageviews match the way Google Analytics reports them so it's honest data.
They need to improve the Data Export Service, which is opaque, klunky and hard to use. If CMs are required to use it to get important metrics, it needs to be MUCH easier, less time consuming.
For a large company the cost can quickly escalate so this must taken into account when renewing. For me, the decision to review will be taken with upgrading to the cloud version in mind as well. My power users love Jive for it versatility but it is important to note that you must be prepared to constantly train and coach the non-power users
The positives for general usage more than make up for the difficulties faced by the community manager. There are some glitches which will ease as future releases are made. No developer resources are required to help with set up and once users get used to the sometimes clunky way of creating content then the experience is quite good
It works wonders. My only gripe would be that there are some customizations you can't make without hiring a vendor with coding experience to implement them.
The support has been fantastic when we have been trying to code our own apps. Jive have went above and beyond what was required to help us out. Bugs fixes are generally very good and they are upfront when they are unable to help or a 'problem' is actually in need of Professional Services
To me personally, the user interface wasn't as daunting as it was compared to Confluence or product board. It made it easier to use without the need to undergo training. Keeping it simple and secure are just a few of its great asset features and together with ease of access (SSO) better controls of people view/access limitations
For the money, it just happens to fit best with our original use case. Now that it's been sold to Aurea, which essentially halted any support or dev for the product before selling it off to Lithium, we will have to eventually move off of it (this assumes Lithium won't hire devs for code they didn't build, and that's not a bad assumption). So, while I recommend it, it's with the caveat that it's been sold and will be evolving in the near future.
