HCL Notes vs. OpenText Vibe

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

1. How fast can I implement it fully for an organisation?
2. How many hours must I invest to get it up and running?
3. How does it compare to the competitors similar software?
4. Once up and running how much time and money will it cost me?

From the point of how it looks I would like to use it. As it is part of the Novell suite I would like to use it as I have already paid for it. So in conclusion with the help of Novell I might be able to implement it the way I want it but without extra cost.

• 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

• You can create electronic forms with powerful workflows behind them. This allows for supervisor approval/rejection of forms. The workflows also allow for email alerts when certain stages are met.
• Built in social media tools. Each employee has a feed which other employees can follow.
• Allows employees to create teams in which they can chose members and rights.

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

• Saving documents from word using the Novell vibe add in is slow and sometimes word will freeze before the document can be uploaded to vibe

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.

We would never go back to a spreadsheet to manage our inventory! Since Vibe is essentially free for us there's no reason not to continue using it. We plan on rolling out more processes in other departments for the coming year. The biggest obstacle is change. People don't want to change doing things they have been doing for years. If the workflow saves time people will embrace it.

Incentivized

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.

At this moment it still looks you need to do a lot to be able to use it and to be honest that time should be used for work not for configuring a communication tool for the business. Yes I understand that it takes time to learn something to use in the organisation , but with this tool I see the help desk having to answer a lot of questions on how to use it or once someone has done something how to undo it.

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.

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.

The implementation was good, it is the follow up that we need to do ourselves that takes time and effort.

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 think the closest well known product that stacks up to Vibe is Microsoft SharePoint. But I really can't make a true comparison because when I tried SharePoint, I didn't know quite know where to start which really dissuaded me from exploring further. With SharePoint, I hear and see that it can do a lot of things, but I feel like I have to be a coder of some sort in order to know what to do. And the templates available to start from is far from what I actually need in order to be productive in my industry. What my team migrated from was an open source platform called Projectfork. I really loved that platform, but it is easy to break. So in search from something stable, I stumbled across Vibe. It gave me the features I was accustomed to having plus the reporting, improved document versioning, easier flow of setting up users and permissions, and push notifications.

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.

• Collaboration has increased.
• External access to Vibe has been positive.
• Managers have taken on more ownership of the system.
• The learning curve was difficult, and near vertical, at times due to Vibe being so different than what empoloyees were used to.

Incentivized