Personify Review

I have over 15 years experience with this vendor across multiple associations. In the old days, there was a strong sense of community that made up for the shortcomings of the system itself. It was also clear that the management genuinely cared for customers. Since the acquisition, it's really gone downhill. I expect ownership and leadership changes to be rough in the best of times, but Personify really falls short on delivering on its promise. Personify has long been known for it's expensive implementation, limited documentation, slow introduction of modern features, and painful upgrades. They are at heart, still an n-tier system based on robust back-end server infrastructure that is always harder to customize than would be expected. For over a decade, customers were promised a separate user layer, that would simplify this. Perhaps this eventually worked for some clients, but I always found it to be limited to simplistic changes. They get very low marks for data services and web integrations. Personify based their entire online strategy on SOAP web services and DotNetNuke. Stubbornly holding on to these strategies for years after it was clear that they were ineffective. This was doubly compounded by their attempt at providing SSO options that were not based on any industry standards, and always difficult to implement. Looking for responsive driven design, not here. Communicating with clients? Don't expect much. I did have many meetings with Edi, and then Eric. Always offering reasonable steps to improve our partnership and always getting promises about followup and action. Dust in the wind. In one twelve month period, we lost 3 account managers, two tech leads, our project manager, several business analysts, and management of our local (Chicago) office changed hands. During that period, the only time Personify reached out to us was to share the news that they had acquired SmallWorld Labs. Thanks Eric. Home run. Now that I have moved on, I can reflect on the years of wasted effort trying to work with Personify. I would not wish them on an enemy. Perhaps they are turning a corner, but they've burned too many bridges for me.