Unily

Comentarios: Improved internal communications via ability to publish news stories, personal insights and social discussions. Sophisticated expertise location via people directory, profiles, skills metadata, search. Functionality to build portals to support communities of practice. Centralised area to connect the global enterprise and reduce silos. Notifications help reduce email. Gamification to increase engagement and recognition. Essentially the software has provided us with a platform that enables knowledge sharing and collaboration. We are on the way to reducing email traffic, and reliance on shared drives for document management.

Puntos a favor: Flexibility of functionality to build sites and integrate with SharePoint to support communities of practice. Supports expertise location through the people directory, profiles and Insights feature. It looks great and can be branded. So easy to use through drag and drop widgets and an intuitive CMS. Straightforward to administrate via permission control. The user experience is seamless; navigate through metadata, dedicated areas for different features such as links, news, documents, social channels, and search is powerful. User support is fantastic, Brightstarr support their customers every step of the way. Overall, my aim was to implement a technology that would be a mechanism to support knowledge sharing, collaboration, communication and ultimately be the foundation of our digital workplace through integration with Office 365. Unily does all of that!

Contras: I rely heavily on metadata to drive the search, navigation and tagging in Unily. Unily metadata is driven from the SharePoint term store, which is excellent because I only need to manage one term store and it synchronises overnight to Unily. It would be good if the synchronisation was more frequent; instead we just plan for the overnight synchronisation. The Unily metadata feature is superb however at times, it has been tricky to get the balance right when building the term store to suit both the Unily and SharePoint environments. Don't get me wrong, it is not a problem - thanks to support from Brightstarr, I have now set it up correctly for both systems. The metadata aspect just needed extra attention during set up and I had to adjust my thinking a little in terms of how I set up my SharePoint term store. If metadata is not your thing, rely on the experts at Brightstarr!

Puntos a favor: State-of-the-art Intranet Solution that helps to broadcast communication content, allows collaboration within teams & communities and is the launchpad to other processes & applications of our company. It integrates seamlessly into our strategic IT landscape and allows us to feel the fresh breeze of digitalization everyday.

Contras: It changes the "old-days" approach to software projects. With the Unily Evergreen Roadmap we now face the fact that you want to be automatically in the move to strieve for the next big thing to enter your organization. Not really a "con", but an organizational challenge.

Puntos a favor: Ability to reflect our brand perfectly I didn't think we could create such an impactful intranet that easily!
It's so easy to use, both from a content management point of view and the front end user; a really intuitive platform.
There's a multitude of easy to use (and move) widgets to create really engaging pages.
The apps & tools area ensures that employees go to the intranet first to find their other applications.
Powerful search functionality.
You can buy the off the shelf product, but the BrightStarr team are able to develop custom items for you as well.

Contras: Metadata - the platform relies on this for drop down lists and tagging content, so I spent days creating lists. The BrightStarr team were very helpful in trying to make this less painful and ran a custom piece of work to bulk upload my initial lists. But after that any changes need to be done manually. These don't automatically sort alphabetically so this has to be done manually, which is time consuming. You must commit time to this during development, it's crucial.
You can't search for images in the CMS even though it looks like you can I'm sure this is being worked on as it's such an important functionality.

Comentarios: - Improved collaboration and connection of our employees across the world
- Improved knowledge sharing
- Engaging platform

Puntos a favor: Ease of use, straightforward navigation, customisation, personalisation and incorporation of Yammer groups.

Contras: CMS needs to become more user friendly, in particular uploading/adjusting images and search for individual images, as well as options to structure a news item with bullet points, images, etc. to make them look more engaging.

Puntos a favor: Easy to use as a tool. Support team really knowledgeable and helpful. If I raise anything as high priority it gets fixed ASAP (within reason). Our account manager is great! Super responsive and helpful. I do like that it updates all the time, although this does mean it's more prone to bugs (obviously).

Contras: Because it's software as a service it's very prone to bugs - this can get frustrating. I would like to be able to customise more things myself - such as formatting and page layout.