Unily

In general the CMS is straightforward and intuitive to use and enables the administrator to create inclusive, consistent, eye catching and engaging content relatively quickly and easily. Our digital marketing team use Umbraco for a lot of their web development work and the CMS is very similar so was relatively easy for various developers to pick up. I really like the native video hosting application and built in media library.

The document management tools are limited and don't support early versions of SharePoint (we currently have 2013) - only the Online solution. It is fine for storing documents but unless the Global Search is initiated it's not the easiest method of locating a document when you have a lot of document content on the site. The document preview is useful but can be confusing for the user as you then have to download the document in order to activate any hyperlinks in the document. Also, some tools I would have expected to be standard when we first signed up have only appeared in the last few months and are not as good as some competitor tools, especially 'Forms' for conducting surveys. The SurveyMonkey application is far more intuitive and easy to use than the Unily solution. It would also be nice to have a live poll widget available so that as users cast their votes for something on the home page the display updates in real time.

We liked that the software was (supposedly) customizable to our needs and synced with Sharepoint. We also liked that the company provided personalized tech support.

-The CMS is extremely glitchy, unreliable, and prone to "bugs"
-The Sharepoint/Unily software syncing was extremely difficult
-We had to figure out many of these glitches ourselves, with very light support from Unily
-The dozens of technical issues resulted in our delaying launch of our website by two extra months

The in-house social network is straight forward which makes the difference to increase the adoption of our users across the company.

AI could be brought to personalize content and experience. A digital workplace in 2020 must be personalized to get relevant content at a glance.

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!

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!