NetForum Enterprise

Customer Service:

The bright spot. Support is friendly, timely, and knowledgeable. And since it's based in the U.S., language is not a problem as with so many providers. My only reservation is that sometimes they can't fix a problem because of platform limitations, and refer your ticket to development. All in all, a good experience here.

Ease of Use:

Day One of my introduction to NetForum Enterprise felt like a step back in time. The graphics were dated. Even on a Mac using Safari the text was hard to read. The interface had no dashboard or jumpoff page like cloud platforms I like. Navigation was like a foreign country until a person showed me. I'm no stranger to technology, so this was a rough welcome.

Subsequent experience with the interface has been similar, with occasional exceptions. For example, mouseover tooltips almost invariably echo the fixed text on the page. How is that help?!

Relationships in this product favor individual memberships over organizational ones, but we've been able to overcome most of those setbacks without too much hardship. But it does come into play at times.

At least you can learn the interface. And once you're used to it, it's not terrible, which is why I gave it 2 stars instead of 1.

Reliability:

The service rarely goes down, but there are what I would call "brownouts", especially for those who work on the back end doing customizations. Many days I have to try more than once before getting a stable connection. Occasionally the lag is abysmal or the VPN won't connect, so I decide to give up and work on something else.

Customization:

This is a slog uphill through mud under barbed wire. Whether or not you experience a hail of bullets depends on your boss.

Even if you know MS SQL and HTML, customizing forms is difficult and unintuitive. The GUI for designing pages is riddled with bugs and glitches, and requires MS Internet Explorer. (I hear 2017 doesn't require it.) There is much more to the iceberg just like this, such as the confusing relationship between forms, wizards, and objects.

The challenges here probably stem from the underlying architecture. Unless you have someone with the time and ability to perform/learn complex scripting, you will be paying developers to do the work. And the costs rack up quickly, because this platform eats hours like a hungry alligator in a bunny enclosure.

If you need features that don't exist, there are third-party services available for a fee. It may in fact be cost-effective to pursue them in place of customization.

Conclusion:

This product could be a decent fit for larger associations, especially those which rely on individual memberships. I recommend a competent developer on staff with a training fund, or else a budget for customization and/or third-party add-ons.

I cannot recommend this for small or medium associations without them knowing the challenges they face. There are almost certainly better AMS products for their needs.

(Not incentivized, just an opinionated and partially-frustrated customer.)

NetForum Enterprise has long been marketed as a comprehensive and robust software solution for membership-based organizations. However, I have found myself frustrated and disappointed with the product's performance. In this review, I will delve into some of the issues that have been experienced when using NetForum Enterprise.

Customer Service Lacking

NetForum Enterprise's lackluster customer service. Their support team is slow to respond and often provides inadequate solutions to their problems. This can be especially frustrating.

Persistent Caching Issue

Since December 2023, my organization has been experiencing a persistent caching issue with NetForum Enterprise. This means that information is not updating correctly, and changes are not being reflected in the system. Despite months of work, the NetForum team has yet to fully resolve this issue, causing major disruptions for our staff and members.

Expensive Customization

Another major drawback of using NetForum Enterprise is its costly customization options. Need to update a report that comes with baseline options? That's considered customization and will cost you extra. Want to make changes to confirmation emails or welcome letters? You guessed it, more money. These additional fees can quickly add up and put a strain on an organization's budget.

Limited Marketing Module

The marketing module in NetForum Enterprise is also lacking in functionality and flexibility. We have been told that customizing content, such as confirmation emails and welcome letters, requires additional customization fees. And even then, the options for customization are limited and clunky to use.

Clunky System

Overall, in my opinion the entire NetForum Enterprise system has proved to be clunky and inefficient. Completing simple tasks often requires multiple steps and can be time-consuming. This can be frustrating for organizations that need a streamlined system to efficiently manage their membership and events.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the drawbacks of using NetForum Enterprise far outweigh any potential benefits. The persistent caching issue, expensive customization options, limited marketing module, and clunky system all make this software a poor choice for organizations looking to effectively manage their membership and events.

As you may know, this is one of the top three or four larger AMS's available on the market. But that's not because it ranks as one of the best in that market. The folks on netFORUM enterprise have mostly been on there for years. They got in when the systems for a big association were not as varied and up to date as the choices you have now. My key issues with NFE are:

1. Community Brands has taken several decent and good companies and pulled them into a bad company. netFORUM and its creators were (and still are) members of our community. They sold to CB who then began systematically making the service and the support worse and worse. They shared development resources across all their products and as time has gone on, the support and development of the product have pushed many of us to get support and customization from third party vendors.

2. The product doesn't seem to move forward in the look and feel, nor the technology underneath. - Lack of REST API's instead of web services is one example. Another is the lack of modern capabilities in the eCommerce platform and pages. We had to go to a separate eCommerce platform to get what we needed in terms of bundling content, events, products and memberships. 

3. Expense. To have it on-prem is expensive in terms of the licensing fees, maintenance and support and running a hardware environment. They do have a cloud option which we never really looked at because before we'd look to move our on-prem to the cloud and take that expense on, we'd just assume move to something modern and effective.

4. Ease of use is not there. It's built like an old Microsoft spreadsheet with tabs and rows of search results, etc. There are better looking and easier to use systems out there.

The system runs reliably as long as the hardware environment it's on does. And I've seen plenty of people do very detailed customizations, so if you are looking for a system that can be totally customized for your needs, you should certainly put netFORUM on your list, but it should be on there with other ones as well.

• The events module especially is a constant source of complaints from staff and even members. As a chapter organization, providing AMS support to all our chapters is part of the benefit to them, but several have paid for a different event management platform because NetForum is so finicky. The technical support is so bad that I honestly wonder if NetForum is the unloved redheaded stepchild of Community Brands, especially when I see people have good experiences with NimbleAMS or Aptify.
• There are loads of updates and service packs to stay on top of and customizations and configurations might hold you back and keep you on a previous version of the platform for years too long. Logging in can feel like traveling back in time. 
• We've been using NetForum since before Abila acquired Avectra (2013) and the user experience and customer service has gotten worse with each merger or acquisition. We would have already changed our AMS except COVID took a chunk out of the budget. 

My company has been using netFORUM Enterprise for the last few years. Overall, we have enjoyed using this system and have been pleased with the ability to customize and tailor nF to meet our organization's needs. Customer service has been wonderful - very pleasant to work with and quick to respond. Sometimes there have been some minor fuctionality issues, but that likely is because this system is designed for organizations with a smaller membership base than ours, and we made a lot aforementioned customizations to the system to get it to function as we desire. The reporting capabilities are helpful to be able to drill down and see transactional or demographic trends with our members. I would recommend nF Enterprise to any medium-size membership organizations and hope you enjoy the system as much as we have.

I am a project manager for our Association's membership dues process and we have been using netFORUM for over 2 and a half years going into our 3rd cycle. The system has been great to work with and each year it gets better. We just renewed for our 3rd cycle as mentioned and had a less than 1% error rate. Our support team has been amazing to work with by completing customization on customization to fit our complex business. Great team and system! 

We have a SaaS instance of 2014 NFE. It is definitely a nuanced AMS - the AMS side of things works very smoothly, however, the fundraising module needs a lot of work, for example, the out of the box functionality requires donors to create an account before any donationw can be made. You also need staff/partners skilled SQL to really make the most of the system.   

NetForum offers a lot of customabilty that can be extended and integrated to fit your organization's needs. With the customization comes the need for staff to test each patch and change prior to implementation. This is an important item to note for small staff associations when considering their options. 

Overall, support is knowledgeable and helpful, and offer solutions and insight when and where they can. For bigger system issues, issues go into a que to be addressed. Not directly related, but netFORUM community is a great resource for connecting with other users and sussing out best practices with your particular version of netFORUM. 

eWeb, where the member interacts with the AMS, is the weakest link. As others have noted, in today's world where Amazon transactions are the benchmark for e-commerce, the eWeb shopping experience leaves much to be desired. Out of the box, no quick way to add multiple items or donations to a shopping cart for quick and easy checkout. 

The other issue with the eWeb is that MAC users can often encounter an error in the checkout process that prevents them from competing a transaction without logging out or forcing a hard refresh of the page.

Certain updates to the eWeb can take 24 hours to show, since certain elements are cached into an application pool for 24hrs. It is possible to force a refresh of the application pool, but doing so forces current eWeb users to be log back in and as such, it should be used sparingly.  

I like the product a lot.  It is extremely customizable.  That's wherein the trouble lies I think.  We've not had so much trouble with the core product, but with customizations.  It is really difficult to tell what potential problems you can be introducing down the line when you stray from baselineI think we lack the staff required to truly manage it as well as it should be.  Every upgrade requires a lot of testing, and you never find everything it seems. 

Another complaint is that a few of the modules are not developed as thoroughly as some of the more core modules, so if you really want things to work for you in those areas, you're almost definitely going to be doing some customization.

Be cautious, very very cautious.  When you customize things, expect the returning cost per upgrade to be almost as much as the original devlopment cost. 

So many changes since my first review, which was not long after the Abila acquisition.

We remain on the 2014 version of the platform, because the 2015 version was really kind of a lost version that started down a path that was abandoned and the 2017 version remains a mix of old and new UI and technology elements between 2014 and 2017.

Recent indications of the current owners of the product, Community Brands, are that they are pushing to complete as much of the UI and technology transition to the responsive, MVC model introduced in 2017 as possible by this Fall. We'll re-evaluate at that point whether the move to 2017 is worth it.

Right now, the version of NetFORUM we're using continues to provide a useful and extremely customisable platform, one that allows even a 1-2 person IT team with the right skills to easily modify or add functionality to the system and build integrations with other systems in short order (as long as those systems will interact with the now-aging SOAP protocol that drives most of NetFORUM's prebuilt web services).

For those without an IT team, any investment in an Enterprise-level platform is going to require external support. Thankfully, there are now even more talented consultancies to choose from to help in that regard.

Whether NetFORUM Enterprise is the right AMS for you comes down to defining your needs, when and where you'll need to do things differently than the default "baseline" approach, and where your comfort level is in terms of balancing the potential cost and complexity that come with extreme customizability. The product can certainly do almost anything you'll want to accomplish, but it's unlikely to do so without engaging IT talent (internal or external) to get it there and keep pace with your business strategy on an ongoing basis.

If that kind of committment scares you, you may be better served by a simpler product that doesn't have the same level of flexibility; but also does not come with the same level of IT overhead. But, don't make that decision without talking to veteran customers of the product, and skilled consultants who can help implement and support the platform. Also talk about options like whether you want the vendor (Community Brands) to host your NetFORUM Enterprise system, whether you should host it yourself, or whether a consultant-serviced hosting approach makes the most sense for you.

For its faults (and no AMS is without its faults), NetFORUM still delivers a powerful solution that can be customized and extended to meet (or help meet) your goals.

Some will say that an AMS platform built on a "standard" CRM foundation (e.g., Salesforce or MS Dynamics CRM) is the future; and I'm somewhat inclined to believe there's at least potential truth to that. But don't think for a moment that such an approach is not without it's own level of committment in terms of IT support needs; and, building on a platform that already has it's own usage fees like Salesforce means that your per-user costs are going to be significant. Weigh. All. Your. Options. Carefully. And. Thoroughly.

we feel that this is a good product but when changes are needed you either need someone on staff that understands how to make joins, create objects etc or you will need to engage services with abila and pay.

netForum Enterprise can work if you have a dedicated IT department/staff or a large budget for long-term IT consultants or relationships with the consultants that implemented you. If you do not have IT or technical staff, then this is probably not the right system for you.

I implemented in 2013, and their support was dreadful at that time. Support seems to have improved lately, particularly after the acquisition by Community Brands, but that could also be the result of me knowing the limitations of the system now and tempering my expectations.

Do not expect to have bugs fixed in a timely manner. Expect regression.

Upgrading is a huge challenge. I have upgraded once in 5 years and the project took 9 months to complete . We had to test every customization and recompile all our custom projects that were integrated which meant reaching out to developers that had left our company and had to pay them as consultants to make a few updates. That was even a small-scale upgrade as we upgraded to a new version on the same build (2013.1 to 2013.2) which is rare. My next upgrade will be from 2013 to 2017 so I'm anticipating an endeavor.

I will say that I really appreciate the database model, so if you or staff have advanced SQL skills, then you can really leverage the platform, but the eweb/iweb interfaces don't do the database model justice.

So, it depends..do you have the budget and IT staff and patience to deal with this or is there a better off-the-shelf SAAS platform that will give you 90% of what you need and 100% less headache than netForum Enterprise...

Our number one issue with Abila's NetForum Enterprise is that baseline only checks one datapoint, email, to create an account.  In this day and age, our members and customers are all using more than one email. This is onerous for a small staff association as we need to have a regular process in place to continually de-dupe our records.  In addition, Abila's business model is that they regularly release "hot fixes" to remedy bugs found in the system.  It is then up to the association to:

• Copy data from Live over to Test
• Deploy the Hotfix to Test
• Test all regular processes in the Test Environment
• Troublshoot if necessary
• Deploy the Hotfix to Live
• Test all regular processes in the Live Enviornment
• Troubleshoot if necssary
• Start all over again within a month or two when the next Hot Fix is released

The System is not diffuclt to use for day to day association management tasks, but the amount of time it takes to maintain the system does not work well for a small staff organization. That said, we only use approximately 1/2 of the modules available with the Enterprise system.  It is most likely overkill for our needs.  As of writing this review, we have determined the need to conduct an assessment of our business practices to see if NetForum Enteprise is truly the right system for us, or do we need to go to RFP for a new system.  We will be working with an as-yet unamed consultant to help us through the process.

When we upgraded a few years ago we took everything back to baseline.  After an evauation on the health of our data, we determined we are going to have to customize the account creation workflow as well a eWeb in order to make it easy for our members and customer to self manage their data.

Before making a decision to go with NetForum Enterprise, I would highly encourage any organization to fully understand their business processes, and be very clear on the amount of time required by staff to maintain the system. 

our system has been customized and with every upgrade, there are numerous glitches. Things, like password reset, break and are extremely difficult to have fixed. We also have issues with members not being able to rejoin. The difficulty is that for some people it works and for others it does not (the Internet browser is not the issue). Very frustrating. I also don't think the custom reporting mechanism is easy to use. Everything seems to need to be down on the backend.

netFORUM has been a great database management tool. We’ve had the ability to customize a ton of fields and pages, allowing us to really drive growth and keep track of individuals related to the organization. We love the impersonate tool and the ease of use of netFORUM in general. 

netFORUM Enterprise is an excellent AMS that provides a ton of customazitions.  You can extend and integrate it to your organization's needs.  This can become an issue if you don't take a careful approach, however this is often needed for the unique needs of organizations.

We recently implemented the netForum AMS system. It is a godsend for us because the system we were coming from was 30 years old. So, old, antiquated system. NetForum offers a lot of customabilty over what we were coming from. it is a wonderfuld system that Ihighly recommend to anyone considering upgrading to a new AMS.

 I really like the usability, functionalities, and integration process. Customer support is top notch