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.
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Prefinery
Score 10.0 out of 10
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Prefinery is a closed beta management and launch platform designed to hemp you learn from your early adopters.
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
Prefinery's technology makes it easy for our business to run effective referral marketing campaigns. I like that I can view campaign stats and manage rewards on a real-time basis and keep track of who is talking about our software. Prefinery helps us to achieve our marketing goals and attract new clients!
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
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.
I chose Prefinery for its flexibility, form builder, detailed analytics, and branded email campaigns. In the past, I have used several [giveaways] and referral software. But each one seemed to have some [limitations] or missing features. Prefinery is different It's a great example of simple, minimalist, yet powerful software. Its power lies in specializing in one area and doing it rather well.