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.

Thought Farmer's customer service during sales, implementation and post launch have been and continue to be top notch.

We have no negative feedback or improvements to mention at this time.

The product itself checked off every box our organization needed, but the service we received from our Project Manager and Customer Success Manager really stood up. There was not a question they couldn't answer for us.

There isn't anything I've found I don't like about this product. I have card suggestions, but these are not complaints.

For our organization the most impactful feature has been connectivity with our Active Directory and the ability to more easily control permissions via security groups in ThoughtFarmer. Each user has a profile in the Intranet allowing us to get more granular with permission and security.

Additionally, the product has been very easy to use from an administration perspective, and creating, adding and editing content for our content authors has been simplified and doesn’t require understanding of code to create engaging, interesting content.

Integrating with our existing business processes has also been fairly easy, and in many cases the ThoughtFarmer platform has improved our process. Their “all in one” application has allowed us to reduce the number of applications we use when performing updates to our Intranet, creating efficiencies.

We have very few complaints about the software or vendor. We do wish there was more control over Admin roles, as an Admin has full access to all functionality, rather than being able to assign different functions to different individuals or groups. The Admin Panel is robust, and we would prefer to lock down certain functions to our IT teams and not to the other Intranet Admins.

We also wish the in-app alerts were more robust. Currently they only say whether content was changed or not, but does not tell the user what changed (unless the user is an editor, who can see version history on the page itself, not within the alert). Ideally we would like there to be a summary of changes visible to all users, even if they are not editors themselves.