AnswerHub Software

One of the best off-the-shelf Q&A products in the market

AnswerHub made it extremely to set up the infrastructure for a Q&A community, and it was overall a great experience working with them. Looking to the future, I hope they can modernize some aspects of the platform, including analytics, moderation workflows, the templating language, and API.

Pros

Easy to configure and customize for most Q&A needs. AnswerHub has very robust user and content management features out of the box (e.g. privileges, tagging, following questions, etc). The application can be easily extended through their API. Hosted and self-hosted options are priced competitively, and customer support is extremely responsive.

Cons

The built-in analytics are lacking and somewhat rudimentary. The question and answer moderation functionality could be improved, especially to enable more complex workflows. Finally, the API could be more stable and get more active development to support more use cases.

From users point of view, experience is great and solution is easy to use

Pros

Intuitive for end-users and pretty simple to use. We like the built-in rewarding system as it encourages users to use AnswerHub more frequently. UI is minimalistic and not cluttered with a lot of gadgets from the start.

Cons

Administration interface is totally different from the overall product look, some options are hard to locate or in places I wouldn't expect them. Some minor problems with search (queries don't always return what I'm looking for and I'm using exact words from the question). Can't override global notifications properties for all users but have to click through each one of them (I can do it for new users but not existing ones). Administrating privileges is quite complex and confusing at times until you figure out all the specifics (group-level, global, role permissions, ...). Can't get any logs out of cloud server except with help from AnswerHub - would be great if we could look at logs directly through administration (recent SSO problems). Minor bugs with shortcuts on Markdown editor which collide with shortcuts on our Slovenian keyboards. Advanced Analytics could be more user-friendly.

AH user for ~6 years. Product is well featured and easy-to-use for end users, moderators and admins.

Offers a feature often requested by our employees and customers, and does it in a way that is intuitive, quick and useful. The pricing is also reasonable for what our company needs.

Pros

It offers a strong set of capabilities at a reasonable price, and the company is good about responding to and addressing issues and questions with the product itself. I appreciate the extensibility of AH, and am glad to see improvements come to the product over time.

From an end-user perspective, it takes very little time to learn how to work with the system, and the gamification engine does help keep some users engaged.

The Q&A style of discussion offered by AH is also often a very strong selling point, both for customer end users but even within our company itself.

Cons

The company's professional services has struggled to be as effective partner with us as we need, causing delays to much needed functionality. Part of the issue is what I see as growing pains for the company, trying to grow it's customer-base while attempting, and not always delivering on the responsiveness they used to have. The tool's current reporting and analytics is somewhat rudimentary, and although I hear they are working on improvements, I'm still waiting.

Intuitive user interface with great features that enhance collaboration.

* Built a robust community where users could engage in Q&A and regularly contribute quality content. * Rewarded user contributions and encourage active participation with reputation points. * Delivered a valuable user experience through a wider range of functionality.

Pros

Gamification elements like badges, reputation points. An ability to control permission based on a reputation score as a kind of gratification for active users.
Expertise features improve recognition! "Ask an Experts" helps to ping experts, same time you can define your expertise manually but also automatically by system to become an expert for a specific topic.

Cons

Analytics functionality that it is built-in. It is not fully reliable. The product is still being continuously improved so there some features still missing.

Works fairly well. We've used it for 6+ years.

It helps our support organization be more productive - customers can get their own answers, and support can post answers here too.

Pros

Very few products do this well. I think stack overflow is based on this product.
If you're support organization needs help to track issues and get help from user communities, or have user communities help themselves, this is the product for you.

Cons

Its a Java app. If something goes wrong, it takes a while to figure out the problem.
There have been times that other IPs have scraped our site and made it unusable.
Managing spammers is not ideal. But same goes for many other similar products.

This powers the developer community site for MSFT Visual Studio

Pros

None. I've opened 2-3 dozen issues with microsoft about all the pains this software has.

Cons

With the implementation at MSFT's dev community site, navigation is poor.

It doesnt have "my issues", it has "Items I Follow" which is as useful for managing support issues as facebook's "Top Stories" is with keeping up with friends and family (this means it is not very useful).

Wasted visual space everywhere on the pages. I took a stab at making my own client UI, but the site is serving chunks of HTML to the the users when displaying issues instead of passing JSON.

Horrid and difficult to navigate alignment of posts, comments to those posts, and solutions.

You cant see a full and concise list anywhere. You get 5 (now 10) issues at at time displayed "card style". If you need to see other issues, you must click "See more" a bunch of times. This is a real pain when trying to keep up with 100+ open issues. The list cant be sorted. Results appear twice.

Issues can be closed and locked for comment by moderators. This is extremely frustrating to users when its clear the moderator does not understand the problem or simply makes a mistake.

There is no place to see posts i have reported or the results of the report.

The whole idea of requiring a paying customer to garner votes to get a company to fix bugs they have just created is malarkey, and perhaps that makes AnswerHub a victim of just being the wrong tool for the job.

This isn't about friendships, so we don't need a social site. It needs to be a competent issue and request tracker, and that it is not.

Stable, flexible and community driven.

Pros

The software is extremely stable, we've found great flexibility with add-ons and community-driven tools, and bringing it into our domain has been fairly simple. The team at AnswerHub is also extremely helpful when working on user issues together.

Cons

At times I wish the moderation tools were more flexible on the front end. I often find myself wanting to do some simple account investigation or moderation, and it would be great if I didn't have to manually search the back end to do so.

The folks at DZone are wonderfully responsive both electronically and in person.

Our corporate level product forums are primarily based on functionality of this product, although we fail to take full advantage of its functionality.

Pros

I like any number of features that come with this platform including Space/SubSpaces, metadata grouping, the wide variety of email notification selections, and the flexibility of the formats.

Cons

I wish the new content list was formatted as Master/Detail instead of standard single column list. I also would prefer that there were more choices than just publish or delete when reviewing content as a Moderator. There should be a means of sending a Question back to draft status.

Overall, I'm having a good experience with the AnswerHub platform.

We moved a lot of the user's features request from a ticket-based platform, which is closed, to this open platform that is accessible for all users to see and participate.

Pros

Very customizable - for me, it's a plus, when the product is missing features and there are ways to work around it.
Good search, good support community, good support.

Cons

Some built-in items (kb,etc.) are implemented as plugins, which means you can't convert from one item to another.
We had to do a lot of customizations, for stuff we'd expect to be out-of-the-box (such as blocking users from posting before validating their emails).

Easy and fast tool to use as a Q&A site

It is a tool that offers more than just a question and answer model; it allows you to create an interactive Q&A community. Users earn points and badges for useful participation while providing relevant answers to the community's questions. At the same time, users build up their own reputation as an expert in a defined area. You can also share your ideas to ensure that good ideas aren't overlooked. The AnswerHub is another way to share knowledge among employees, partners and customers and is a great solution for reducing barriers between people, departments and companies. While posting questions, answers, comments or ideas, together we create an enormous, well-organized base. Pros - Powerful for building the knowledge base based on questions/answers - A great channel for less official customer support: it enables to provide tips, suggestions or incomplete answers which are sometimes good enough for the customer's need rather to create a ticket in the support system. - Spaces, topics, questions and ideas can be clearly organized and managed - A user contribution is well tracked, reputation is clearly visible - The reputation gamification is cute. - The related questions feature is really useful - Topic list is useful, if people tag questions appropriately. Also useful in finding out the experts in certain areas and questions in that area. - The team is eager to improve the tool by adding new features. Cons - Unfriendly admin console - A large range of roles (permissions) for specific actions on the site might be overwhelming at first

We've been using AnswerHub for 4 years and right from the beginning the community started to form.

Pros

The software is very easy to use as an administrator and for users it is very intuitive so users can figure out what to do by themselves.

Cons

We need detailed usage stats and this area is the part where AnswerHub should improve most. There is an included analytics but in this age of detailed analytics it is unfortunately outdated.

pretty good. Responsive feedback.

Pros

It was customizable which was nice. They also had a lot of features that we needed already built out so we didn't have to do it ourselves.

Cons

It wasn't easy to customize. The code sometimes was very hidden and we weren't sure if things were in a jar file or if they were in some other location.

Overall a nice experience, a few hurdles here and there, but continues to improve.

No special benefits.

Pros

Functionality and features of the site are nice, the site layout is well done also, overall pleased with the product.

Cons

The reporting functionality is the greatest weak point of this software and needs some much needed love and attention.

It had served our Q&A forum needs

Pros

Not many hiccups. It serves the purpose of Q&A community. It has easy to use UI. Fast and responsive and reliable.

Cons

Search is something that needs to be improved. Admin panel also needs some improvements. Not many updates and feature releases.

Robust, feature-rich software allowing great flexibility in enabling community to support themselves

Pros

Ability to define different spaces and target/tailor content to each space.
Ability to configure the different levels and karma assigned to people for answering questions.
Being able to subscribe to updates of posts so it's like an email/forum-based tool as well.

Cons

Administrative interface could be more user-friendly as it's difficult to understand various configurations.

Spam control could be improved as I can't find options to require approval of new users - we have many spam users sign up for our answerhub and need to go back and delete all these fraudulent accounts.

I would like to see more stabilities and performance enhancement to our site

Pros

The interface is intuitive and easy to use. There are certainly a lot of features we like. For example, an user can control visibility of an answers. As an administrator, I can adjust points given to user actions.

Cons

Each time there is a software upgrade, we have to re-validate our custom theme and plugins. This hinders us from upgrading smoothly
Bugs in the current version don't get patches to be fixed.

AnswerHub is one of the key tools we have to help move projects forward and create solutions.

Finding solutions.

Pros

Ease of use. Hands down the most useful platform out there for managing a community and generating a truly usable resource for developers.

Cons

I wish collapsing long threads was simplified. But overall the most helpful thing would be having more users involved and using the platform.

Intuitive Q&A features. Super flexible in personnalisation. Support team with goodwill!

Pros

- Great customer support.
- Highly configurable (permissions, theme).
- Easy to make changes in the code yourself once you get the hang of it.
- Responsive to any screen format.

Cons

- No easy personnalisation via the admin dashboard though avdertised, you need IT skills, patience and curiosity to make theme / feature changes (minimal code documentation). Or you will need to go through professional services all the time.
- Few bug fixe releases
- Not regular enough new feature releases; we have had known bugs pending for a long time.
- Lack of moderation action logs ("post I have reported", actions taken by moderators etc...)
- Missing in-app notifications; there is only email notifications.
- Weak for knowledge base use (could use more tree-structure navigation and more wiki-style).

Excellent knowledge base

We are using the AnswerHub as a way of providing help to Associates and Agents online. The application makes generating articles very quick and easy. The immediate search function has proved very helpful.

Pros

Easy to use ..... Ability to segregate content into "spaces" if necessary ..... Excellent help and support. I have never had to wait to talk to the vendor. They are knowledgeable, friendly, professional and simply excellent

Answerhub has provided an easy to use, feature enriched tool to help manage complimentary support

Pros: Quick to implement, Easy to administer Feature rich Excellent Support which is very responsive ( when support is correctly or incorrectly perceived as "slow to respond" they still meet expectations and surpass other vendor support response times) Cons: Reporting is not as robust as it should be. Though other tools can provide this function, it would be good to improve on this as an out of the box solution that can meet customer analytic requirements. Documentation can be improved on In a fast paced changing environment, Answerhub has provided a tool that is intuitive, robust and requires minimum support. This allows for quick adoption, deployment, and savings in implementation costs. When support is required, the team is responsive, professional, customer oriented and show the highest caliber of any support team I have worked with.