A delight to use for Intranet Managers, Content Authors and employees

An easy to use Intranet portal with social capabilities that enable employees to be more engaged. Simplified infrastructure for on-premises, no need for massive server farms. Great setup and onboarding experience with their professional services team. Their support staff is stellar, fast and caring for your needs.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

ThoughtFarmer - specializing in Intranet websites

We are working with a knowledgeable team in TF to help us achieve Intranet success. There are also tools and processes that we have in place. For example Content Governance for consistency, leveraging Analytics to understand how employees are using our Intranet and keeping our content fresh for relevancy.

Pros

Integration with our systems did require custom development work from TF and we crossed the finish line. This work was part of our scope, so no surprises. The TF is knowledgeable, diligent and responsive. All qualities you hope to find with your vendor. The software is intuitive and easy to use. It supported our custom branding and allowed for our content management team to achieve their results.

Cons

There were some limitations in the software that were logged as feature requests that we hope to see in production soon. It's difficult for a vendor to support the many 3rd party applications and integrations. We did find some workarounds, so no real issues here. This product was a significant improvement from our previous solution, so difficult to isolate cons this early in our implementation.

Excellent Customer Service

The customer service team at ThoughtFarmer is great. Every time there is an issue, or we don't know how to solve a question, we reach out to the team. They are speedy with their replies, and usually have very straight forward direction and imagery to help solve the problem. Thank you [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] for all of your help in the first year of our Intranet!

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Finally found the right Intranet!

It took far too long to find this product, and perhaps ThoughtFarmer needs marketing help, but this product is a near-perfect fit for our medium-size video production company. The organization and simplicity of this database will be easy for our employees to use, and hopefully they will enjoy using it.

Pros

I love the simplicity, user experience and features offered in ThoughtFarmer, as well as the ability to administrate without needing a deep IT background.

Cons

The calendar integrations are one-way, and can only come from ThoughtFarmer. We use other programs and it would be helpful if ThoughtFarmer could receive RSS calendar feeds, not just create them.

Collaboration made easy

Pros

You can set up a corporate Intranet quite easily with this product. There are a lot of out-of-the-box cool templates, features and functionalities. Integration with Active Directory is also a very nice feature, the security of the sections of our Intranet isa based on AD Security Groups. Support is quite excellent also!

Cons

Document collaboration and and co-authoring is not really possible. Working with files is still difficult in ThoughtFarmer. You can upload Word documents , and edit it using a small app that runs on your computer. Unfortunately, sometimes the files get lock, and changes get lost. As a workaround, we've started linking files on Office 365 to collaborate instead of having the files directly on the Intranet.