HCL Notes vs. Microsoft Viva Engage

I often work with teams from other country and regions, hence HCL Notes is a very useful platform for internal company management operations. It standardized organisational work standards in most of the offices worldwide. HCL Notes also enables chat with other team around the world that I find very helpful when initiating conversation or just want to have a quick update rather than sending emails and waiting for replies. However, HCL Notes is not very efficient in web browsing and user still need to use other internet service providers.

Incentivized

Yammer provides a social network experience for the enterprise, providing a "Facebook for work". Its mobile app provides an excellent user experience, showing the full mix of communications happening across topics and teams. The web app, while it hasn't evolved much in the last few years, provides a good experience consuming news. Personally, I use Yammer every morning to see what's happening across my company and comment, like, and share to interact across silos. As long as the size of the network inside of Yammer is managed - likely partitioning a large organization into business units, etc., - then Yammer provides an excellent platform for social news and "bottom up" collaboration across teams. Its free-form posting style, including articles and polls for interactive content, helps break down silos across the organization. Contrasted with the boring world of email, Yammer is a tantalizing world of pictures, GIFs, and videos. At LiveTiles, we share company and team news via Yammer, enabling others to see the progress and milestones - from a new office to a new customer - without the heavy burden of a company newsletter or similarly curated content. Even though we have fully adopted Teams for day-to-day, intra-team communication, Yammer is still the gold standard for inter-team communication.

Incentivized

• Data sharing via small database format is valuable as they are quickly deployed, easily managed and distributed on backend email servers.
• Integrated messaging allows quick communications between geographical sites reducing long distance costs.
• Policy documents for registering new users, setting initial security levels, assigning default database access is managed easily with the admin client.

Incentivized

• No one likes getting a long thread of reply-alls. With Yammer announcements and updates can be shared — without cluttering your inbox.
• Yammer's mobile apps are great for our on-the-go sales team to stay in touch with our office staff.
• Yammer's social aspect makes it incredibly easy to use, even for our less tech savvy teammates. If you've used Facebook, learning Yammer will be a cinch.

Incentivized

• The simple user experience can be touted as a positive, but it is also a negative in some ways. Compared to other calendars, email and chat tools, IBM Notes looks like it is from the 90s.
• We have constant issues with chat crashing. This is the main reason so many people in our organization chose to switch away from Notes.
• There aren't a lot of integrations with IBM Notes and other applications we regularly use. Notes seems to have been left behind by many.

Incentivized

• While Yammer has been an easy transition from SharePoint, it's still relatively new and unknown. Some employees claim that feel like the product was just another "add on" to the entire Microsoft Office experience.
• When introducing new employees to Yammer, they are not as receptive because of how widely used SharePoint is across businesses and industries.
• Functionality is simple, but still vastly different from SharePoint, thus creating a learning curve.

Incentivized

Since companies started to moved their email systems to the Exchange platform and the cloud, we are unable to find any new projects with IBM Notes, the marketing share and software price is another issue, so we have to move to another platform.

Microsoft is dedicated to continual improvement on Yammer. They realize the value that Yammer brings to the table with their clients. In the short time that we have had Yammer implemented, we are just now beginning to see the strong impact it has on becoming more effective and efficient around collaboration.

Easy to use for the user, most of the apps we developed, there is not much need for user training. Most of the times, we just do a demo to the users group and they can pick up from there.

Overall easy to use and intuitive, although limited in the possibility to personalize layout and look & feel of a site. Some functionalities are not easy to use, like document editing, but some others are quick and effective (posts and tagging above all). Performance and responsiveness of the Yammer site is typically acceptable, in my experience.

Very available

It's a simple product but it does provide value.

I've been using the production for a very long time and very happy with it. Also, all the online resources and forums for notes is very friendly and easy/quick for getting help. I found out that compared to Microsoft or Oracle or any other platforms, IBM Notes online forum is the best I have seen.

We have never had to use the support for Yammer. The tool works well and we have not come across any bugs. User Interface is simple and easy to use, similar to other forum type products, thereby removing the need for any extensive training. Team members are invited in and immediately are able to start using the tool.

Incentivized

The training that Microsoft provides is very generic training for Yammer. I like the fact the training is short and easy to understand

Implementation is easy and smooth if the requirement is well gathered/documented. Notes is a RAD platform, all projects in Notes is simple in the implementation step.

We organically implemented the product

I've already answered this question in the previous questions however to sum it up IBM Notes stacks up VERY WELL! It has a LOT of really good business/enterprise features like enterprise-grade Dropbox-like storage, synced email/calendar/contacts, it supports a LOT of third-party add-ins, easy-to-use and friendly, very strong and robust, and most importantly it's a LOT more secure in my opinion than the competition.

Incentivized

I like how Yammer has functions that are fun and interactive, which can give you much more to do than using Teams or even Microsoft Forms. Yammer helps people feel included and gives people a better sense of how their friends and co-workers are feeling on certain issues. Yammer is a lot more like a social media platform than a work tool even!

Incentivized

• ROI for us has been extreme. In the late 1990's we automated dozens and dozens of paper-based processes and created workflows for activities that had never been formalized before. Additionally all those forms with their comments, etc. have been captured in a central place to serve as audit trails.
• Whenever we need faster access to data (mail or otherwise), it's quick and easy to deploy a new Domino server somewhere, setup replication of appropriate databases, and get the local Notes clients pointed to those resources. So that to me is positive ROI because it represents time savings based on user need.
• Tech. Support would claim a negative ROI in terms of supporting the Notes client, Notes updates, peculiar Notes issues, and users who complain about Notes. That is certainly true to a point. The Notes client is a much more complex piece of software than, say, Outlook. But we have to remember that Notes deployments are not just for Mail but many, many applications as well. In the end I'd say we might have 1 or 2 user complaints per month, typically around Calendar issues more than anything else.

• Nothing negative. But what we tend to forget is that Yammer is just a product, not a vision for change. The true and deep implementation and adoption of an enterprise network needs work and commitment, just like everything else. The true benefits will only emerge over time.

Incentivized