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.

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.

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.

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.