Small World Labs Community is a hosted collaboration and social networking platform with easy drag & drop modification capabilities. Small World Labs offers implementation and community engagement services, plus an open API for integration with other systems. Small World Labs has clients across industries, but a high concentration in the nonprofit area.
Small World Labs was acquired by Personify Corp in 2016.
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PowerDMS by NEOGOV
Score 7.0 out of 10
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PowerDMS by NEOGOV is a software platform designed to recruit, train, equip, and protect employees across their careers, used for policy management, community engagement, and staff scheduling.
You can tell from the CEO and all staff that this is a very competent company that wants you to succeed with integrity. There is a strong support and services team that works collaboratively with us to make sure we are always getting what we need. They provide 24x7 emergency support, online ticket support, email support, a client community, and the ability to call and talk to the same account manager or community consultant every time (I even have Mariano's skype and he replies on weekends!). They recently launched a client community - so they are now even practicing what they preach. Our questions in the client community are always answered quickly.
Getting 100% signature compliance on policy updates used to take months but since automating out policy management updates in PowerDMS, we can get 100% compliance in as little as 2 weeks. Internal requests for things such as training, purchases, etc used to be pushed up the chain of command via a paper copy and would often get misplaced or lost in a full mailbox. Using PowerDMS to automate those requests put the power back in the requester's hands and increased transparency and accountability across the organization.
Design of your community through the admin panel is very easy to pick up. Drag and drop functionality on the site admin allows you to make quick changes to your community on the fly. Easy to modify the look and feel of the site and keep pace with the changing needs of our membership.
The platform is updated on an ongoing basis with new exciting functionality added with each release.
The mobile version of the platform is very easy to use and looks great on all devices and operating systems.
Feedback on enhancements to the platform are taken very seriously and often suggestions from customers end up on the roadmap for the platform for future enhancements.
Not much to say in this section. Anything that the product doesn't currently do is quickly identified and prioritized appropriately on their road map.
Chat room functionality doesn't exist yet, but has been placed on roadmap.
Instant messaging between users doesn't exist yet, but is roadmapped.
We're unable to run a couple of specific reports, based on what's available in the reporting tool. There's a workaround that our community administrator can perform that is a little more time consuming.
The Workflow process in PowerDMS is not as easy to grasp as some of the other concepts and requires a little more explaination, especially for non-administrative background users.
Users are unable to view the steps in a Workflow template in order to determine which Workflow would work best for their needs when routing documents.
It would be great to have multiple message options for past due inbox notifications in addition to the options for past due tasks to encourage users to go to their inbox to review their messages.
Small World Labs has been a great partner in relaunching our community. They have had great ideas of new ways to use our community to better service our members. They are very knowledgeable in the world of online communities and are forward thinking about new functions to enhance the user experience.
I have had nothing but positive experiences with PowerDMS from day one. If we ever run into a situation we are unsure of, PowerDMS support has ALWAYS been able to answer us basically immediately. I really love that they are constantly seeking to improve and expand.
While not necessarily user-intuitive, with a small amount of dedication to training and learning how the system functions, it becomes very usable. I would say that the usability scale is quite user-dependent. For a standard user that just needs to review and sign documents, it is very easily used. On the other end, management does a bit more of a learning curve.
We use PowerDMS in the cloud so our performance might be different from other users who use on-premise. The program has always been up with very minimal downtime and always seems responsive and snappy when navigating the UI and searching documents. We don't currently have any integrations with other software.
The people at Small World Labs are very accessible. I can email, open a ticket, or call and they are there. I'd also point out that senior management is quite available too. We frequently have talks about potential strategies and new things we might be doing, which is great. I think the whole organization genuinely likes what they do and likes helping us succeed.
I just wish we had some in-state support. The contacts I have had with customer support have been great. Awesome communication, problem-solving, and support. I have talked to and met Stephanie Williams (CSA for Power DMS) at the most recent Entrust conference. She was professional and devoted time to addressing our agency needs.
In-person training is more ad-hoc based on if they are traveling to you or you are going to visit them. I imagine that if I paid for in-person training that it would be set up as well, but I've just used the standard training that comes with the initial set up and ongoing support.
We had staff turnover at our own organization during the implementation. We were able to get the community up and live in a good timeframe even though that happened and we had to switch some people around for managing the project on our side.
Implementation of PowerDMS was near seamless. The product was able to input existing policies and procedures within a few hours, which helped to lay the foundation for future use. Having PowerDMS on-boarding readily available was also a huge benefit.
We evaluated a few different community platform vendors over the course of a couple of months. I believe we also evaluated Jive, Lithium, KickApps, and Powered.
Our previous document product was Image Silo. It was a stable-enough product, but was strictly an indexed filing system. PowerDMS goes well beyond indexing (which it does very well) and provides countless more features and functions as described above. I would describe the difference between our previous product and PowerDMS like the difference between the library and the Internet. Both contain information, but on is limited, while the other has it all.
Created efficient processes for approving document revision
Migrated what originally was a paper system to electronic
Accessible for any employee by logging in, employees do not have to seek out policy and procedure binders, and updated documents can be automatically sent to inboxes when updated.
