I speak with Wildfire and Spark users on a regular basis to find out how they are using the software. I really enjoy this dialogue and believe it is one of the most important activities for improving both Wildfire and Spark. Not too surprisingly, several patterns have emerged and they are pretty interesting. Here are some of the quotes I’ve heard:
“It just works.”
I hear this sentiment a lot. People find Wildfire and Spark extremely easy to set up with quoted setup times ranging from 5 minutes to an hour.
“How would we compare Microsoft’s Live Communications Server to Jive’s Wildfire platform? Like the difference between night and day; the difference between a company who cares only for profit, and a company who listens to the needs of customers.”
“It would only take us half a year to realize Live Communications Server would be a mistake.”
This quote came after a switch to Wildfire and Spark which was precipitated by a rough experience with LCS.
“We actually own LCS but have never deployed it. We knew it wasn’t going to be the answer.”
“Not only was the move into Jive’s system easy, it gave us the management tools, met basic audit ability requirements and allowed us to connect clients across the World directly to our staff over Public Instant Messaging applications.”
“It’s handy having the presence status information.”
People often find that presence and availability information in the roster is an unexpected benefit.
“End users are used to public IM systems and they feel like we are taking something away. Having the gateways helped a lot during the deployment.”
People like to keep their public IM contacts active and the use of gateways provides that flexibility.
“The end-user community views Spark as an essential tool to work now instead of just a luxury item.”
Wildfire and Spark quickly become mission-critical in many organizations.
“Definitely use the LDAP lookups for user & group management if available.”
Using LDAP or Active Directory is a best practice cited frequently by administrators.
“One other key aspect of deploying internally is we needed the LDAP integration for the users to use their existing active directory credentials. This proved successful and greatly help the roll out.”
I am incredibly excited that so many organizations are seeing these and other benefits. I’d love to hear about your own experiences with Spark and Wildfire!