CARA

Account Managers View on Cara

Vorteile:

Depth and breath of the system, good user interface

Nachteile:

Sometimes not focused enough, too many moduls

Cara - Modern intuitive UI

Kommentare: The overall experience is great. Right from the product selection --> Communication --> config movement --> data transformation --> Testing --> Production go live. It was one of the best projects that I have ever worked with

Vorteile:

We have moved from FirstDoc to CARA almost 2.5 years back and the response was excellent. We were surprised by the extent of a positive reaction. Never seen such a turnaround in the user sentiments. CARA provides intuitive UI and good OOTB features which enables end-user to locate and work on their content pretty easily. It also provides highly configurable UI for the administrators/power users to deploy the new changes very easily and effectively. We are very pleased and thanks to Generis to successfully migrate and transform our system to the new heights

Nachteile:

Generis support can be better and they need to work on the documentation more effectively.

CARA in an highly diverse QM organisation

Vorteile:

Capability to generate language specific master data / taxonomies which helped the global organisation to stay in control of meta data systems while allowing local inits to adopt the taxonomies to their local needs and habbits. Very easy and fast way to hook in local adoptions/ configurations.

Nachteile:

Difficult to manage the local adoptions on a globa level due to missing functionality of managing code segments in central libraries and therby avoid duplication of customizations for local enteties.

CARA: great tool, not so good support

Kommentare: My overall experience is OK. I know CARA is a powerful tool but if one doesn't understand how to use it and configure it properly, how powerful it is doesn't matter. I just wish there was more "how-to" documentation and better tech support. This is the general consensus among my colleagues as well. Our team develops solutions for several other departments across the county. When they have an issue, we need to be able to resolve it quickly. Technical support overall is pretty much non-existent; everyone is nice but if there's no resolution then.... I was given an account to login to but man, most of the time it didn't work (I had reset my PW several times) and when I did get in, I wasn't able to find what I was looking for - I eventually gave up. First, there should be a knowledge base of problems and solutions, secondly there should be a way to open a trouble ticket which should be immediately assigned to a tech-support person that can work with you on resolving the issue. DOCUMENTATION!!! A COMPREHENSIVE TRAINING MANUAL FOR DEVELOPERS; one that is tightly coupled with the amazing online class we were offered a couple of years ago.

Vorteile:

I think CARA is a powerful tool. Integration with the Documentum platform and our existing business process was easy. The out-of-the-box functions are awesome; I especially love that you can customize to down to the level of an attribute. Finally, after having the product for a few years, we were offered an excellent on-line training (unfortunately at the time, I was developing in another tool... so I lost most of what was taught). Would be great if this training was recorded and saved to refer back to.

Nachteile:

1. One feature in particular is a dynamic quick search. HPI, another UI tool, has a feature that allows you to start typing in a search box and as you're typing, the results start to filter. The search goes across ALL columns (attributes) defined and it is invaluable. It adds a tremendous amount of flexibility and ease and greatly impacts productivity in a positive way. 2. CARA uses BRAVA! for document viewing but it doesn't offer much documentation on how to use it and use it effectively. I searched the internet and found something that helped me learn the tool but there seems to be a bug with it... there's no real tech support. 3. Why can't we customize the look and feel of the forms? That would be a nice feature so that more than one field could be placed on row.

Easy to use - intuitive Administration\Control Panel

Kommentare: We have a legacy home grown application that is over 20 years old and on old technology (Mainframe\COBOL\CICS). It is tricky to integrate it with newer technology and one unexpected consequence of this is that it is difficult to retain younger workers with the older technology applications. Area by area we have been moving them off of the old and onto the new and the user experience is far superior. Greater search capabilities and options to integrate with modern applications.

Vorteile:

I like how easy it is to get up and running. Within hours, we were able to install the product, connect to Documentum and have a basic working User Interface.

Nachteile:

It's a testament to the product that have to nit-pick to find anything. Exporting and importing the overall configuration is all or nothing so there is no way to make minor development changes without exporting\importing everything. We have a few configuration settings that are customized by environment (i.e. test\model\prod) that I have to change manually each time I import changes from Test to Model and Model to Prod. I would prefer more granular export\import capabilities when developing to only export\import the object I am changing. For instance, Dashboards and Custom Actions allow exactly the kind of capabilities that I prefer. That and the "cleaner look" lead me to using Dashboards much more frequently - almost exclusively. There are a few features in the more traditional Explorer UI that it would be nice to have in the Dashboard\Portal UI like drag and drop, etc.