FuseBase

Full disclosure, I bought my codes in November 2020 and bought the monthly unlimited deal. I had big plans for Nimbus. And you always have more bugs to start than later on. Probably newer buyers are not as jaded. One of the big selling items for us was the clipping function. To this day we have never managed to get a clip made smoothly and easily saved to where we wanted it to go.

What were our plans? We set up a 3 person testing team with the intent to roll out end of 2021 for 250 staff and 1000 students. The speed of the whole app, searching, opening documents was very painful. So considering our small 3 person team was suffering we pushed back to summer 2022 before going to bigger numbers of users and therefore bigger headaches. We continued testing And Nimbus loved us they told us so they were working on it.

Speed got a bit better and GDPR was also a necessity which we needed to wait for, but they were working on it and well lots of people were working on it and we were not in a rush. We were excited about the document features about collaborating together, but it soon became clear one person could accidently ruin a document so we needed the folder structure to have a versioning system in place, it was not intuitive. We needed to email each other to point out who had worked on which one (and keep saving them so IF someone deleted things we had a back-up)- we created a separate word document to try and keep one source of truth. (As again saving it in Nimbus could have someone accidently editing it.

Front end it was - notion-like - but as with so many notion like tools - it may be notion-like but its not notion - we could not sort on tables and template management was a nightmare - also the to-do was either centralised which well we are frankly not looking for software for organising us - we want to write and research and collaborate - so we used an excel sheet and embedded it where we needed it.

So we tried sharing documents - but it got very confusing which documents had been shared - no visual clues - so we made protocols and tried to add live documents to its own folder but that further complicated an already complicated folder system. By the beginning of 2023 we had agreed that there was a lot to like but big issues that would keep it from being for the bigger user numbers as we had initially envisaged.

I tried to keep it alive by doing some small projects but actually we always faced more complications with Nimbus than we had without it- "where was that document that I had last updated?" Another big issue we ran into was had I been a member of an organisation when I wrote something or was it on my private user account - for the smaller project sometimes people would ask us why they were being asked if they wanted to be members - did they need to be and well like I said Nimbus gave more complications than they ever solved .After a few deals here - my golden rule is - how clear is the deal. If its not clear what people are offering then there is probably not a clear vision. Maybe this new portal will solve exactly these issues of collaboration and versioning we have had but honestly I am not sure.