Improved internal communications via ability to publish news stories, personal insights and social discussions. Sophisticated expertise location via people directory, profiles, skills metadata, search. Functionality to build portals to support communities of practice. Centralised area to connect the global enterprise and reduce silos. Notifications help reduce email. Gamification to increase engagement and recognition. Essentially the software has provided us with a platform that enables knowledge sharing and collaboration. We are on the way to reducing email traffic, and reliance on shared drives for document management.
Pros
Flexibility of functionality to build sites and integrate with SharePoint to support communities of practice. Supports expertise location through the people directory, profiles and Insights feature. It looks great and can be branded. So easy to use through drag and drop widgets and an intuitive CMS. Straightforward to administrate via permission control. The user experience is seamless; navigate through metadata, dedicated areas for different features such as links, news, documents, social channels, and search is powerful. User support is fantastic, Brightstarr support their customers every step of the way. Overall, my aim was to implement a technology that would be a mechanism to support knowledge sharing, collaboration, communication and ultimately be the foundation of our digital workplace through integration with Office 365. Unily does all of that!
Cons
I rely heavily on metadata to drive the search, navigation and tagging in Unily. Unily metadata is driven from the SharePoint term store, which is excellent because I only need to manage one term store and it synchronises overnight to Unily. It would be good if the synchronisation was more frequent; instead we just plan for the overnight synchronisation. The Unily metadata feature is superb however at times, it has been tricky to get the balance right when building the term store to suit both the Unily and SharePoint environments. Don't get me wrong, it is not a problem - thanks to support from Brightstarr, I have now set it up correctly for both systems. The metadata aspect just needed extra attention during set up and I had to adjust my thinking a little in terms of how I set up my SharePoint term store. If metadata is not your thing, rely on the experts at Brightstarr!
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 10/10
Generally the experience has been a good one, although things have been slower to progress due to some misunderstandings on both sides regarding Unily's full capabilities vs our business priorities as well as a number of technical issues. That said, we have not made our 'go live' journey particularly easy since we have had to change our phased launch plan to a more immediate solution in order to support employees through the Coronavirus challenges, whilst preparing ourselves for a large acquisition and going through some significant business transformation. This means that currently we have created three extranets to help manage different user experiences and whilst it has worked well, it has led to a few complex technical issues which have taken Unily a while to iron out. In the longer term we hope to reduce these down to one 'global intranet' so I believe our future Unily experience will be considerably smoother.
Pros
In general the CMS is straightforward and intuitive to use and enables the administrator to create inclusive, consistent, eye catching and engaging content relatively quickly and easily. Our digital marketing team use Umbraco for a lot of their web development work and the CMS is very similar so was relatively easy for various developers to pick up. I really like the native video hosting application and built in media library.
Cons
The document management tools are limited and don't support early versions of SharePoint (we currently have 2013) - only the Online solution. It is fine for storing documents but unless the Global Search is initiated it's not the easiest method of locating a document when you have a lot of document content on the site. The document preview is useful but can be confusing for the user as you then have to download the document in order to activate any hyperlinks in the document. Also, some tools I would have expected to be standard when we first signed up have only appeared in the last few months and are not as good as some competitor tools, especially 'Forms' for conducting surveys. The SurveyMonkey application is far more intuitive and easy to use than the Unily solution. It would also be nice to have a live poll widget available so that as users cast their votes for something on the home page the display updates in real time.
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 7/10
I have launched websites before and never worked with a CMS this glitchy. We frequently experience issues with basic functionality. Although we have a designated support team of a project manager and tech specialist, the help we receive for these problems is inconsistent. Sometimes they are able to get back to us right away, and other times there's radio silence and we have to follow up. Over the past 8 weeks we have submitted over a dozen "support tickets" because of the simple technical issues that keep popping up. We are extremely disappointed. The online reviews of Unily are stellar but our experience has been a nightmare. I would definitely not recommend this product and I wish we could go back and select another option, but now we've done so much work on this that there's no way we can start over.
Pros
We liked that the software was (supposedly) customizable to our needs and synced with Sharepoint. We also liked that the company provided personalized tech support.
Cons
-The CMS is extremely glitchy, unreliable, and prone to "bugs"
-The Sharepoint/Unily software syncing was extremely difficult
-We had to figure out many of these glitches ourselves, with very light support from Unily
-The dozens of technical issues resulted in our delaying launch of our website by two extra months
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 0/10
Our experience has been great. Our salesforce always compliments how easy it is it to access and navigate. Our questions and initiatives are always heard and supported by their customer support.
Pros
It is ever adapting and evolving with the technical and communication landscape.
Cons
At times technical support can be slow for ad-hoc requests
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 8/10
Unily have provided us exactly what we were looking for our Digital Workplace: Connecting our employees through their In-house social network, integrating office 365 features in one place, bringing a powerful search engine across Office 365 and empowering our colleagues to take the floor through insights and news. The last but not least: We achieved this in less than 3 months! The Adecco Group is now leveraging of an amazing and powerful communication and collaborative tool in addition to a skilled and committed team. We made the digital transformation happened thanks to Unily!
Pros
The in-house social network is straight forward which makes the difference to increase the adoption of our users across the company.
Cons
AI could be brought to personalize content and experience. A digital workplace in 2020 must be personalized to get relevant content at a glance.
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 9/10
Pricing for the Unily Employee Experience Platform starts from $4995 per month, and scales based on the number of active users you have. Enterprise customers with very large numbers of users will benefit from substantial discounts, as will Charities and Not for profit organizations.
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