NetForum Enterprise

We have used Netforum for 15+ years and in today's world where Amazon transactions are the benchmark for e-commerce, Netforum has been a barrier to modernizing our conference registrations. It does not "play well," with our CMS (Drupal). This has been a huge problem.

We opted to implement netFORUM after an exhaustive requirements process. The two most serious competitors were Personify and netFORUM. At the time we we had a very complex membership matrix and these two products were the ones who could best handle it.

The two biggest selling points for us after handling the membership complexities were the hosting which did reduce our total cost of ownership since we didn't have to support our own servers, and the ability to do our own customizations. We always knew the support was a little shaky but not terrible.

netFORUM has changed hands a couple of times now and the support is poor. It seems like it takes a long time to get them to understand the resported problem, and resolutions don't come quickly, easily or cheap. Even showstoppers don't seem to get a quick response. Overall the product is pretty good but the support is extremely problematic.

I give netFORUM a neutral review. It does provide all the necessary features of an AMS and can be customized. The customer support is slow to respond to issues and upgrade process is difficult. In addition, the platform does not have robust reporting capabilities. The netFORUM user group (AUG) helps provide additional support for the platform. This group has an active community of members and meets quarterly.

The NetForum Enterprise platform that has been in place at our organization for many years has been reliable, scale-able, relatively easy to interface, and very versatile. The main downside to the application environment is its difficulty in configuration that requires administrator involvement in the most minor of configuration changes. The market for support vendors is rather thin so major customization work gets pretty pricey.

In all, I would say that the platform has been acceptable enough to make it difficult to commit to replacing it. Customer service from Abila has been good and predictable. SErvice levels for hosting have been excellent.

I have heard all AMS experiences are love/hate and agree. Depending on the day or the goal we are trying to achieve the love/hate dilemma is true for us. When we first got NetForum Enterprise it was brilliant, support and service were also stellar. Ever since Ward sold the product service has gone down hill. Perhaps the issues are stemmed in rapid growth or cultural degradation but the signs are clear that we are all just customers and are expected to wait in line if we need anything. Our expectations are very low for support and issue resolution. It seems that they only reach out when they think we might be leaving.  

The system at its core is as designed by Ward and still has strong value as a powerful, customizable system. Adding fields to tables, adding tables to the database and adding forms or objects are all feasible if you have highly technical folks willing to learn a complex and proprietary framework. The underlying systems are IIS and MSSQL, reports are SSRS so the IT skills needed for handling the core infrastructure and for surfacing data are non-proprietary. 

Overall the system is powerfully flexible and can fulfill most of our requirements. I highly suggest finding a third party Abila partner and planning for additional support cost through the partner for best results.

Good: easy to send out eblasts to any designated group that you set up. Not as easy to actually set up the lists.  
Bad: Hard to set up new lists and not easy to figure out which "category" they belong in.

We upgraded to the newest version of the AMS and found that by doing so we are guinea pigs. We have experienced major "bugs" that have significantly impacted our business processes and member experiences, some ongoing for months. These span across accounting, member joins, renewals, rejoins and donation and reporting elements. We are looking at new AMS options.

The Abila Enterprise product is huge and can do a lot of things. But it does require a lot of work on the back end, so you really need a developer on staff. It also is highly customized making upgrades a nightmare and you have users working on various iterations of the platform which makes R&D slow, as they are working on fixing bugs and updates on so many versions. It also makes it difficult for support, they have to understand all of these different versions, and support all of your customizations. The upgrade process takes months to complete and you are getting upgrade packs every two years. With every service pack it takes hours of testing on your test site to make sure the service pack doesn't affect any of your customizations. Really not end user friendly and I will not even start on the poor customer service experience.

The good: We love that netFORUM has so many configuration options and can be customized when those options aren't available. We understand that it would be impossible to accommodate every possible need across the many business functions that the software supports.

The bad: Although the software is very configurable, this also introduces complexities. Unfortunately, Abila has lost many experienced staff with in-depth knowledge of the product or even the internal processes required to execute on the commitments made to clients. Staff don't seem to communicate with each other or across departments. We usually have to facilitate that for them and escalate often. We find that we are on our own to manage them and can't depend on being guided through the process (implementations, upgrades, customizations) without a lot of skepticism, push-back and questioning. Depending on who your contact is, you may not get any solid advice on how to address issues or configure the system to fit business needs.

Our main issue is a fundamental one - it is a struggle to get our configuration upgraded and keep it maintained. To summarize, our experience has been clouded by regressions, followed by slow response, and having to escalate issues to get attention. We also feel that the UI/UX is lacking, requiring us to "touch"“ many eWeb forms that one would expect to work well out of the box. More specifically:  

• Service Pack/HF Issues: This is a common complaint, in that accepting a service pack introduces regressions, which are later (often much later) fixed in subsequent service packs. This requires one to spend significant time regression testing a new service pack, with the worry that it will introduce additional regressions, and start the nasty cycle over again. We find ourselves limping along with work arounds to avoid this downward spiral.
• eWeb UI/UX: We feel that the UI/UX is clunky, and could benefit from serious usability testing. We have also found bugs in baseline forms, and have been forced to customize many to make the flow make sense to our users.
• Cost: It's expensive, which would not be a complaint if it was a solid platform. But coupled with the amount of staff time consumed by bugs, an onerous upgrade/maintenance process, and the $$ needed for partners to help fix/troubleshoot, it does not seem cost effective.

We are a 12 person association, without a full time systems person, and with a relatively high turnover of finance professionals. That leads to problems when it comes to netforum.

The biggest problems are the frustrations and challenges in the finance team as they struggle to learn the ins and outs. But it has also demanded countless hours of my time to learn how to get what I need from it.

It is probably fabulous for larger associations with the resources and the procedures. But for us it is a constant struggle

We have had so many customizations over the years that we don't know what is where and when we upgrade or load a SP or HF something else breaks. Our 2014 upgrade was a nightmare with all of the bugs NF had and we are still feeling the pain.

Abila's netFORUM Enterprise is a powerful system that is feature rich. The more you use the system, the more ways you can find to use it. Most of the good systems that scale up for larger organizations have the same functions so you need to pay attention to interface (which is clean, easily learned) and the responsiveness of the system to changing business rules without programming.

The configuration/set up is critical to netFORUM's flexibility and value and it is extensive. In the financial areas, if you cannot do something with the configuration options they have, maybe you should reconsider doing it at all.

That said, when implementing this system, I encourage staff to configure deep but narrow. For example, set up a single, representative member type and test it all the way through its lifecycle (i.e. sell, renew, confirm benefit access, terminate, and return after a gap) before you start configuring all the other types. Setting everything up and then finding you have blocked yourself from doing something is maddening. No one wants to play the configuration version of Jenga!

Get your staff training on the baseline and explore its power before you start customizing. Periodically, go back to Abila for training on things like pricing; in upgrades, we get very focused on making sure we can stay in business and do everything that we are doing pre-upgrade. You will miss the opportunity to enhance your usage or simplify your processes if you remain in the dark about new features; release notes are not especially effective in conveying HOW something can be used.

Like any great power, configuration can be used for good or evil. One caveat is that the system is NOT strong on tools that help you check your configuration and make sure that it is complete. For example, you can configure lots of prices for a product and neglect to have even one marked as default or leave gaps in your price dates so that you end up with a 2-day period when the product cannot be sold because there is no active price. You can build (or have someone build) child forms that serve as custom filtered lists of records that need your attention; this works as well for configuration as for customer accounts. It would be nice if a suite of these came with the system instead of having to be built for everything.

Another caveat that I would offer concerns the Fund Raising. Abila has made a lot of improvements in the module but, if you have a foundation AND a PAC, you cannot manage them in the same Fund Raising module. There is a single profile and all contributions are combined. While that might make sense from the POV of summarizing engagement, these two types of fund raising typically have different donor levels and want to see YTD and lifetime totals separately, specific to the cause.

In general, this is a powerful system good that is probably better for medium to large organizations. If you are smaller, or find netFORUM Enterprise to be too much (money, complexity) then netFORUM Pro might be a better fit.

Avectra netFORUM is very difficult to customize and enhance over time. If you don't have an abundance of money to spend on developers and coders to make tweaks, edit content, change the look/design of forms, then netFORUM isn't the right software for you. You can't be nimble and stay relevant with this AMS unless you have those resources.

We are using netFORUM 2015 as our AMS. We have been on the netFORUM platform for over 8 years. As our company continues to go, we feel that we are outgrowing the netFORUM platform. Add to this the changes with the netFORUM ownership/leadership we are now at a point that we feel we have to explore other options. Since Abila has taken over the netFORUM platform from Avectra the customer service has continued to decline. It often takes a considerable amount of time to have bugs resolved. They also need to choose a better process for tracking client development request, project management, and bug resolution.

This system has a lot to offer but it's not the easiest system to operate. Too many situations call for the need to know SQL, which is typically a function of IT. If you are comfortable making changes to commands then this system will probably be a great fit for you. Otherwise, you should get to be good friends with the IT staff, you're going to need them!

We run 8 instances of Abila NF Enterprise and have a really great team of developers that are busy 100% of the time working with our association clients. This is necessary for updating events, creating new online apps, break/fix issues, and integrating with 3rd party solutions.

Very rarely to we use the 'baseline' functionality as it usually does not provide the level of customization that our clients require. This means that we are constantly in maintenance mode and when a new upgrade is released (we upgrade every 2 years) we sometimes miss out on some of the upgraded features because we have customized the application. It would be helpful if Abila had a end-user-friendly 'demo' of baseline features with each new release so that we could share that with our associations. The product and company speaks well to developers but misses the mark with the end-user communication.

If you want a product that is highly customization (by a NF developer) then this is a great option. We have used other 'lighter' products that do not require any developer to customize and are out-of-box solutions but that comes at a cost (lack of customization). It really just depends on the needs and resources of the association.

We are a small association. 25 staff, 16,000 members. We are almost too big for Netforum Pro but on the small side to use Netforum Enterprise. We went live on January 1, 2014 with 2013 Netforum Enterprise We have no IT staff but hired a consultant to help us through needs analysis, discovery, testing and implementation and now have a different consultant to help us with small projects/small changes (table joins on a query, adding a field on a child form, etc). We are so small we did not even buy the Tool Kit. No one on staff knows Sequel. We are going to be upgrading to 2015 in June 2016.

We had some modifications done to the base system, but not too many. We had lot of customization to have the Grants Module work to manage our Scholarship Program (my area) and that did not come online until almost a year later. Getting the Grants Module up and running was a very painful process and still is.

I find in general the querying function is what gives me a fairly heavy user of Netforum like me the most fits. I can see the information on the screen, but have trouble extracting it due to the correct table joins not being in place. Finally, after two plus years of working with the system I think I have all most of my issues are dealt with.

I am not looking forward to the upgrade to version 2015 as I fully anticipate the Grants Module not working correctly. It will take a lot of testing to find the bugs.

Two pieces of advice: If at all possible, attend your Users Group meetings (and most definitely the AUDC conference) to network and test, test, test.

There is a lot to NetForum. It can probably do anything you want it to. But help yourself by changing your workflows to match NetForum instead of customizing the software. It will save you time, money and headache. The customization won't be 100% of what you want anyway (most likely).

I would say it is close to being everything I need, but always just a little short.

At the American Chemical Society, we are a large association (>161,000 members and numerous other users/stakeholders). We switched to NetForum several years ago to replace a proprietary system, which was getting long in the tooth and hard to maintain. NetForum has been a robust solution that supports many of the customizations that we've needed, including management of local sections (chapters), technical divisions, our extensive governance structure, and integration with a wide range of other systems. On the plus side, it has been robust and reliable. On the minus side, it does require a team of several dedicated IT staff to keep our implementation updated and working, the promise of widespread staff access to business intelligence has not yet been realized, and we still have to run separate systems for meeting management, abstracts management, web content management, institutional customer relationship management, and much more. NetForum has proven to be a robust hub for our individual customer data, though.