Hi Verity,

If your evaluation process is weighted in IBM's favor, then there's not much point in going through the motions of doing one. To Claire F.'s point, your users are already telling you what they like, and someone's not listening. If that's truly the case, I would recommend meeting with your manager or the sponsor of the project to make them aware of your preliminary findings and your concerns about the evaluation process. Given the costs, you don't want to implement something that's not going to be used. First impressions are everything - if people don't like what they see, they won't come back.

We did go through a formal process, but did not structure it so that it favored one vendor over the other, even though we are a big IBM shop. We sent out an RFP that had extensive functional and technical requirements. It's important that the larger business community own the functional requirements and the selection, not IT. From an IT perspective, we would have been comfortable going with either solution, but the team had an overall preference for Jive because of it's structure, usability and its configuration and administration capabilities.

As far as usability tests, if you haven't done this before then it would be a good idea to get outside help. They will be able to help you structure it in a way that ensures that it's an apples-to-apples comparison.

Rgds, Claire

We evaluated several options - and for many reasons we were hoping for the integration we hoped Connections would bring. Obviously we are now a Jive SBS implementation (publicly known now). But we went into the process with a clear set of requirements so that it was not weighted in favor of any solution, but ultimately what we thought a system should do from a complete, holistic perspective.

Yes, usability was a major factor. I can't "second" Claire Lash's comments enough. She is right on the money. If the system isn't usable, complete, simple and easily navigated from various perspectives (as a user I want my view of all my content, as a group or community member I want a view of all that content, and as a member I want to customize my dashboard across the entire system and use my dashboard as my activity updates for the people and groups or communities I care about) then it simply will not take off virally.

I can tell you, we, too, had requirements around integrate with Sametime, Quickr, Lotus Notes, etc - because we were an IBM shop for many other applications. But at the end of the day, if we were honest about our core "enterprise  2.0 way of working requirements" - the integration with IBM products were less important.

In our evaluation process, not only did we send out an RFI, but we also installed a proof of concept. This allowed us to get at things like cost of ownership (skills required to install, admin and update) and usability (we had a team of users evaluate our finalists along requirements and usability factors).

Finally, when we decided the approach, we still opted to 'pilot' rather than move forward with a full enterprise contract. For us a pilot meant - limit duration (fix number of months) but do not limit the  audience (meaning all 90K+ employees had access to the site if they wanted). Within 12 weeks we had tremendous viral adoption measured in user registrations, groups and weekly activities. This is the topic of several JiveWorld sessions I'm talking about (so I won't reveal too many more details here until those sessions are completed).