ThoughtFarmer

ThoughtFarmer's ease of use, and the easy deployment on-premises (although a cloud option is available) helped us implement our new Intranet on time and budget while providing users with a top-notch experience for corporate news, events and navigating different processes in our organization.

Social features (likes, commenting, @ mentions) really empower our employees to have a voice be more engaged with our strategic direction, operational insights and celebrating milestones with the recent addition of Shout-outs.

From an extensibility perspective, the platform allows for page templates and widget creation (in browser or with modern development IDEs) and it is now based on React, so page loading and navigation is fast and responsive. Customizing with your own fonts. corporate color theme and images is quick and painless. Need to go a bit further? You can add your own CSS or JavaScript to fill in any gaps from the out of the box theming engine.

A recent overhaul of the search experience brings the experience to what you would expect from enterprise search with the addition of best bets, predictive search, etc.

The people directory is beautifully crafted and thanks to the Employee Directory Connector you can bring your users and their active directory properties (such as department, job title, phone, email) in just a few clicks. For authentication, SAML SSO is an option.

The admin area is intuitive and very powerful as many options are configurable in the UI.

There are only 2 security roles, admin and user, so roles like help desk or others might get exposed to settings one might not want them to have.

From an integration point of view, would like to see more integration with Office 365 as we use it for more day-to-day collaboration. A SharePoint integration is possible, but not sure if it will also work with SharePoint Online.

The software is an incredibly easy to use but very powerful no-code platform which is one of the best examples of no-code I have ever seen. It's so easy to use that we have been easily able to show all users how to upload and modify content.

Thought farmer is organised around a pages and cards system (i.e you have to create new pages and then add cards to those pages). This worked really well for our company so we have no issues with this but I could see this being restrictive to others or maybe future projects we have.

The software is overall straight forward to use. The Thoughtfarmer community page is a great way to learn tips and tricks on various software capabilities that we didn't realize were there.

Challenges with employees connecting to the intranet when off of our Network - but this also may not be a Thoughtfarmer problem! This has made it a bit challenging for our jobsite employees (who never come into the office) to get used to using the Intranet and integrating it in their daily lives. But everyone in the office has had a great experience with it.

The product is easy to use and the team supporting implementation was so helpful, available and thorough.

I believe in an effort to let our company drive the product and implementation, there was a bit of a lack of direction in terms of training. We had sessions where we were shown features but it would have been helpful to perhaps have some assignments or more direction regarding applying what we just learned. After each training session I sort of walked away wondering "ok, what am I supposed to do now?"