Bloomfire

Enables employees with a trove of knowledge

Avantages :

I love how Bloomfire empowers everyone in our company to contribute to our knowledge base and interact with each other's contributions. The community features - commenting, liking, thumbnails - are key to creating that community feel. And it makes such a difference day-to-day to have a single source of truth for our organization. Also, you can't beat Bloomfire staff. Everyone I've interacted with from customer success to product to engineering has been top notch. They are responsive to immediate support needs and they evolve the product based on customer feedback.

Inconvénients :

Some employees find the navigation and search to be challenging. There are some things we need to change about our own implementation to address these issues, and we look forward to future product updates as well.

Easy to use

Commentaires : We use it to house all of the information for a product that I license. We share information across the user base, add articles and find relevant information about using the tools that we license.

Avantages :

Very clear navigation, you know where to find what you are looking for

Inconvénients :

Sometimes I have a hard time finding older articles and get mixed up with new and old material when I am looking for a specific piece of informaiton

Recent Updates Diminish Value of Product Usability

Commentaires : The initial experience was extremely positive, the recent updates significantly reduce the usefulness of the product specifically where tables and embedded documents are concerned.

Avantages :

We use the system as a knowledge base to inform our ongoing software implementations and keep our Support team up to speed on current functionality. I love that articles/posts are really easy to create and categorize. The search functionality works well which makes finding information very easy.

Inconvénients :

The product allows you to embed documents and create tables into posts. Unfortunately, a recent update to the user interface reduces the size of the article to about 1/3 the width of a monitor. As a result, tables and embedded documents are extremely difficult to read as the formatting is severely impacted. I am not sure how to post screenshots. I have escalated to our site administrator who was informed by Bloomfire support that there is no way to revert the settings. Given that we use the system as a knowledge base, we use tables extensively to summarize information for quick and simple digestion. We also regularly embed word documents, PDFs, and Excel files. The new layout/format makes those embedded documents unreadable without extensive zooming or direct downloading of the articles. Prior to this change, the product met our needs and was highly functional. That is no longer the case.

Easy to use

Commentaires : Implementation was a dream. They had a team that helped us manage the project and uploaded all our content for us. As a small team, this was important.

Avantages :

It transposes videos, provides full text search, allows for different groups to be created, user analysis so we know if we are getting our money's worth for the tool.

Inconvénients :

I wish I could edit docs in the tool. But there are few cons that we have found at this point in time.

The way a knowledge base should be

Commentaires : As one of Bloomfire's early customers we saw a lot of potential with this platform. I was in charge of conducting a report comparing some of the available products to satisfy our need for a customer-facing knowledge base. It had to be relevant, easy to use, and fast. We had a lot of undocumented information that our customers needed with no way to provide it. Some of our most important criteria included having an API and SSO (we were going to have our users log in from our customer portal site), an easy editor, fast and powerful search, user management, reporting, and so on. Bloomfire came out on top. Fast forward a few months into using it and we were well on our way generating content, marketing the tool, and getting comfortable with the platform. I was probably the main contributor to a lot of the content, so the almost daily use of the tool caused me to find areas of improvement. I worked a bit with the Bloomfire development team with a list and I'm happy to say that today, nearly every one of my suggestions have been implemented in some way. This demonstrates the company's willingness and capabilities to adapt to their customer's needs. Their team has always been helpful and communicative and would love to see continual improvements in the future.

Avantages :

Clean, easy to user interface. Enough features to still be powerful and handle lots of information, posts, questions, and media.

Inconvénients :

At some point the cost model drastically changed from unlimited to number of users and for our company, the cost was prohibitive from expanding or growing. For other platforms that are not just a standalone knowledge base, but instead include one as a part of their services there is much more value for similar features.