Unily

Avantages

Home page customization was a highlight for me. I was able to fully customize my experience, having quick access to the tools and apps I use most frequently.

Inconvénients

Although I was able to customize my home page, I felt there were some limitations when it came to customizing other aspects of the platform.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi passer à Unily

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

-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

Avantages

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

Inconvénients

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

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi passer à Unily

Avantages

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!

Inconvénients

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!

Avantages

It is extremely easy to configure and set up - also very quick to launch if you are (like we were) pressed for time, but in need of a product that would be appealing for our users as well as being easy-to-use .
Unily's ability to also offer a mobile solution coupled with a way to engage front-line workers, without access to Office 365 was also something that was incredibly appealing to us.
The CMS is extremely easy to use and allows to send email newsletters and track analytics without ever leaving the CMS. Also the technology that allows to machine-translate all of the content is amazing!

Inconvénients

Some customizations require knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to make full use of them and although Unily can integrate with Yammer and MS Teams there are only a few widgets available for these two applications.

Avantages

Very satisfied with the onboarding, training and deployment which were all done remotely. After sales is also very good and having your own Client Services Manager (CSM) makes you feel more than just a number on the provider's database. The search facility on the platform is excellent and the provider strives for ongoing improvement and upgrades which keeps Unily ahead of the game.

Inconvénients

Some Microsoft Office features are missing. Also missing is a birthday widget, which was very popular within our Business.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

The user interface is clean and easy to navigate. The widget set up is easy for the administrator. As a multinational company, the translation function is key (albeit the translation accuracy (google translate) may be questionable). The social functions are also very helpful for the user experience.

Inconvénients

The software has had many glitches over the year, causing many wasted hours for employees of Mowi to recognise and fix. I believe that the supplier should be running a QC to catch these glitches before the end user does.

Avantages

The software is so easy to use, the functionality is first class and the possibilities seem to be endless.

Inconvénients

Truly difficult to pick out and big cons with this product. The only thing I would say, is that it would be good if the mobile app could be customised to reflect internal branding, as this is an extra cost.

Avantages

It is ever adapting and evolving with the technical and communication landscape.

Inconvénients

At times technical support can be slow for ad-hoc requests

Avantages

Easy to use once you get the hang of it. Really great guides on the Universe site, super user friendly. Loads of great features.

Inconvénients

Multi-tenancy onboarding could be a lot better, I think we may have been the first customer

Avantages

The broadcast centre has been invaluable, the use of images and nice layout have made our internal newsletters much more eye catching and engaging

Inconvénients

Building widgets has been a challenge, but I understand this will get much easier with the next update.

Avantages

Easy CMS for content managers to use
Quick to build pages/sites/whole intranet
Good customer service/responsive team.
Integrates with Yammer for commenting
Documents are hosted on SharePoint/O365

Inconvénients

Doesn't surface documents hosted on SharePoint as easily as it could.

As an out of the box solution, the OOTB features are largely very good, and configuration (inc in price) covers a fair amount of what you're after. With customisation ($/£) covering the rest. It's less of a 'Con' and more of a 'be aware' of what you want to achieve falls into configuration and customisation.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

Having been a SharePoint developer for many year having the flexibility to build your own components and pages from code can't be used here, although I believe with an upcoming update you can create your own widgets.

Avantages

Ease of use, flexible page design, easy to control user permissions

Inconvénients

Maintianing consistent layout of site pages very difficult to implement across an entire site

Avantages

Ease of use, straightforward navigation, customisation, personalisation and incorporation of Yammer groups.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

Unily provided us the opportunity to modernize our intranet that we have inside our company.

Inconvénients

Unily needs to release a better documentation and improve their third party integration library.

Avantages

Unily keeps us connected and automatically updates all of our work throughout the entire chain. The intranet software makes work easier and enhances knowledge, thus strengthening effective collaboration.

Inconvénients

Some features of Microsoft Office are missing as well as a widget for birthdays. The CMS has a small problem in addition is extremely defective the synchronization of SharePoint/Unily software is painful.

Avantages

I like the fact that it focuses more on the user experience than the organisation so it becomes something staff want to use rather than it being something they HAVE to use

Inconvénients

THe price is still the biggest drawback as the cost of Office365 licences make it a pricey venture for small to medium-sized companies and start-ups.

Avantages

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).

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

Social Intranet, Search functionality, UX, Usability, Design

Inconvénients

we're happy that we decided to work with Unily.