NetForum Enterprise

• 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

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.