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.
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Higher Logic Vanilla
Score 6.0 out of 10
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Higher Logic Vanilla is a customizable and themable forum software. It can be used for support communities, Q&A Communities and more. There are numerous integrations, including SSO, and connectors to popular software such as Mailchimp, WordPress, Zendesk and Salesforce.
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.
Vanilla Forums is well suited for growing communities that wish to expand without having to change software. Existing larger communities may find the user management part of the tool lacking, although this could be from my lack of experience.
They provide excellent customer service to us on a weekly basis. If we have questions or find something that we'd like improved or even something new we'd like to add to our program, we have a dedicated person we can reach out to who helps us facilitate that change.
We're fond of their add-ons. We use many of them in our community. Some keep our members engaged on a day to day basis. We really like reactions, the keyword blocker, the civil tongue filter, and a few customized add-ons that Vanilla added specifically for our community.
They send us notifications for all upcoming releases, and update their software frequently.
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.
Creating visual themes can be difficult. Although there is an open source version of the software, some of the plugins (gamification, badges) are not available for download, so any visual theme that includes them will need to be at least partially developed on their servers, vs doing the whole thing offline and then uploading it all at once. This can be time consuming as each code change has to be checking in to Github and then imported into their server cluster.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Most of all we could customize the forum to look and feel like an extension of our existing web properties. This makes the forum feel more native to the users coming from or being redirected to the forum. We also had plans of being able to create custom badges we could grant users which was a limitation to many of the platforms we look at at the time. Since we are a software and cloud company, working with a product we could customize and automate via the API was another big factor. Today we have automated flows for reviewing and accepting improvement requests and then pulling them into our ticketing system and updating the deployment status of those requests one we push our updates to our users. Most importantly, Vanilla came forward with a reasonable cost to match our existing CSS and make a template that was easy for us to maintain as we grew.
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.
