Great read, thank you to all who contributed thus far.

@Keith Rowley @Jef Lippiatt 

My two cents worth.

One of the biggest challenges I find is that the entrepeneur/business owner doesnt really have a solid idea/vision for the outcome or result from whatever platform/tool/resource/service/software they invest in to use, even if it's free. It still has a time investment!

The other side to this is that in a lot of cases the result, whilst still short of the desired outcome, is still better than the alternative but not acknowledged or seen that way. Progress v perfection.

And of course this is simply because we are all going to have little nuances, nothing can be just right for every business.

Of everything opined i agree with the comment on Sharepoint, albeit allowing for my comments above, as a straight out vault for storing and accessing it does the job. Fails miserably with the promised extended usage within the 365 environment.

I also agree on Skype, I see Skype as MYOB once was (the market darling) and now they are the poor relation to a whole host of newcomers.

CRM wise, Salesforce will always be the domain of the enterprise level users, for SMB/SME there are far better and cost effective options.

In terms of other dislikes the upside is that there is just so much in the marketplace, so rather than those that dont work and lose time over, here are some of the ones I am finding work for me.

Teams v Slack
Dropbox or Google drive v any other
Zoom v anything
Teamviewer
Bitly
VLC
Canva
Notability
Messenger
Hubspot/Agile
Small PDF

And finally with regard to the training/user comments, doesn't matter if it's a tool/software/app/service, right through to people in roles, if there is no training and therefore poor take up or usage...only one person to blame...the one for whom the buck stops!

Enjoy your weekend.

Greg

I think a lot of this comes down to 'horses for courses', familiraity and price. I've used some tools of which I was not particularly fond but often, that was because my staff was not using them properly. An example of this would be Sales-Force. It's a great tool, but without discipline in your sales team, it's frustrating and sometimes useless. Managers need to remember that business tools are not magic and it's up to them to train there staff.

Someone already pointed out that you cannot expect too much from cheap tools. I would add to that and say that if you buy an all-seeing all dancing business system then you will probably find your staff never completing the learning curve. Rather give them something simple and let them complain about the short-comings because when they do complain, you can bet your bottom dollar that they are making provision for the shoertcomings they see.

I find all this to be very true with websites, which ar just a business tool. Some customers ask and pay for every sophisticated inclusion I can provide - and then use a fraction of them. Optimistics humans see a house when they view a pile of bricks, beams and cement.  A good manager looks at all of those things as tools and decides which ones his staff can use. 

I don't like Crello, I would rather use Canva. Crello does have features that Canva doesn't have, however, overall it is a thumbs down.

There are a few video apps that I dislike. Wave.video is my go-to along with Filmora.

I don't use Skype, too many trolls and weirdos.

Hey @Yee Trinh I get that it is a negative question, but I think helping others avoid bad products and services that may waste a tight budget and valuable time is worthwhile.

One product I would want other people to avoid is Skype. Originally it wasn’t a bad program, but over the last several years I’ve noticed that is has become extremely unreliable as it often crashes or freezes. Additionally it doesn’t easily allow users to make sub-group chats outside of a specific scheduled meeting. I believe Microsoft is phasing Skype out in favor of their new product Teams, which I must say is a much better product overall.

Another program or suite I would recommend against from my own use is Confluence and Jira. They are fine programs, but they are needlessly cumbersome and overly complicated. There are products that do similar things that are much easier to use for development tracking and agile processes. I personally like Trello and Asana, but there are many other good alternatives.

Lastly of my do not touch list would be Sharepoint. It is easily one of the worst and yet most widely used products out there. There are several reasons I avoid this program when possible. It is very dated and unnecessarily complicated. The second reason is because it is dated there are big concerns from a security stand point because it is not easy to upgrade. Related to that, Microsoft is again phasing out the existing version of Sharepoint for one that works in a more connected way to their 360 suite (no verdict on if that will be better). Finally from a skills perspective, in my experience a Share Point developer cannot easily transition to other types of development such as front-end frameworks or back-end programming because Share Point is such mess from a code perspective. Honestly I would recommend looking into Alfresco or just using a multi-site Wordpress instance. Again there are other interesting tools out there.

 

@Natasha Hawker @Daniel Rouquette @Rose Davidson @Paul Juchima @Bronwen Sciortino @Bridget Holland @Keith Rowley I would be interested in your opinions on this question! 

I find any tool which isn't used properly a pain point. All too often companies have systems set up which they just don't use, or that some people use and not others. I'd say that unless proper training is given to all users and the systems are streamlined, don't bother!

Such a negative nancy @Jef Lippiatt ! But yes, agree that it's good to get advice on both fronts. 

No one specific product comes to mind. There's always positives and negatives to any. Often, I read about people complaining about low-cost solutions.. in which my response is.. what did you expect??! 

Often you're paying premiums for a reason. I have yet to come across a product where I've paid premium and received a lesser experience. And the ones which are more budget friendly, tend to have their shortcomings but that's somewhat expected. 

Also agree @Hatty Bell that what I may have a poor experience with, may come down to how I've used it, or rather how I haven't used it. 

If I was to name one product that I don't believe warrants its price tag.. it would be Mailchimp. It's not cheap, but it's quite a basic tool. Easy to use, does the job but there's a lot of options out there that can do a lot more at its price point. 

We put a lot of research into finding tools that work for our purposes at SavvySME so I can't name too many that are bad products.. simply ones that didn't fit our needs. 

What are some products you'd recommend others avoid @Jef Lippiatt ?