When its time to get a new AMS, skip netFORUM
As you may know, this is one of the top three or four larger AMS's available on the market. But that's not because it ranks as one of the best in that market. The folks on netFORUM enterprise have mostly been on there for years. They got in when the systems for a big association were not as varied and up to date as the choices you have now. My key issues with NFE are:
1. Community Brands has taken several decent and good companies and pulled them into a bad company. netFORUM and its creators were (and still are) members of our community. They sold to CB who then began systematically making the service and the support worse and worse. They shared development resources across all their products and as time has gone on, the support and development of the product have pushed many of us to get support and customization from third party vendors.
2. The product doesn't seem to move forward in the look and feel, nor the technology underneath. - Lack of REST API's instead of web services is one example. Another is the lack of modern capabilities in the eCommerce platform and pages. We had to go to a separate eCommerce platform to get what we needed in terms of bundling content, events, products and memberships.
3. Expense. To have it on-prem is expensive in terms of the licensing fees, maintenance and support and running a hardware environment. They do have a cloud option which we never really looked at because before we'd look to move our on-prem to the cloud and take that expense on, we'd just assume move to something modern and effective.
4. Ease of use is not there. It's built like an old Microsoft spreadsheet with tabs and rows of search results, etc. There are better looking and easier to use systems out there.
The system runs reliably as long as the hardware environment it's on does. And I've seen plenty of people do very detailed customizations, so if you are looking for a system that can be totally customized for your needs, you should certainly put netFORUM on your list, but it should be on there with other ones as well.
