Overview
What is HCL Connections?
Connections from HCL Technologies (formerly from IBM, acquired by HCL in 2018) is a collaboration tool and employee digital workspace with key features like social analytics, blogs, document management, and a social network.
A multifunctional tool
Connections is a proven tool for managing complicated projects and keeping your data secure
IBM Connections in the Cloud - One Stop for Communication and Collaboration
A complete package but expensive and complicated to maintain
IBM Connections - Not Connecting Ideas!
IBM Connections is useful
Not flashy, but it gets the job done
Connect with IBM Connections!
The business problems that it …
Great all-around tool for the large but also small environments
IBM Connections on-premises: Excellent, but SMBs may want to look at the cloud version instead.
Connecting with your colleagues made easy!
IBM Connections Connects people in a different way to work
IBM Connections review
Non-techy review of IBM Connections
IBM Connections is everything you need to unite professionals around the globe.
Pricing
What is HCL Connections?
Connections from HCL Technologies (formerly from IBM, acquired by HCL in 2018) is a collaboration tool and employee digital workspace with key features like social analytics, blogs, document management, and a social network.
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- No setup fee
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- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Alternatives Pricing
What is SharePoint?
Microsoft's SharePoint is an Intranet solution that enables users to share and manage content, knowledge, and applications to empower teamwork, quickly find information, and collaborate across the organization.
What is Microsoft Teams?
Microsoft Teams combines video conferencing software with team collaboration tools. The communications platform allows MS Office users to conduct conference calls and share files via SharePoint, and join or initiate a group chat.
Product Details
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What is HCL Connections?
HCL Connections Technical Details
Operating Systems | Unspecified |
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Mobile Application | No |
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Reviews and Ratings
(52)Community Insights
- Business Problems Solved
- Recommendations
IBM Connections is a versatile platform used organization-wide to connect users, find and organize information, and collaborate on projects. Users across departments benefit from the collaboration tools offered by IBM Connections for internal projects and team collaboration. Additionally, frontline production workers to board members rely on this software for project management, knowledge sharing, collaboration, and idea sharing.
IBM Connections addresses various business problems such as document editing, sharing, version control, as well as enabling increased transparency. It serves as a centralized repository for constantly changing information with multiple levels of permissions, tagging, and spaces. This makes it an ideal replacement for wikis, providing structure in organizing and updating information effectively.
Organizations in the insurance industry utilize IBM Connections to write wiki places and blogs in different languages. Mizuno utilizes IBM Connections organization-wide to keep everyone informed and connected, share data, and stay updated on company-wide events. The software is also being evaluated for cloud options to provide document control, integration of social tools, and compatibility with various devices.
Users find value in IBM Connections' communication features to connect with staff and disseminate information within communities created for individual departments. The software's usage statistics and reporting capabilities are crucial for users to track the effectiveness of their content. Additionally, the HR department benefits from the MS Office plugin for sharing and editing documents.
Overall, IBM Connections has proven to be an invaluable tool in improving communication among teams, facilitating collaboration between departments spread across large geographical areas, and providing a centralized platform for everyday operations.
Users commonly recommend IBM Connections for the following reasons:
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IBM Connections is praised for its ability to enhance collaboration and social networking within a business. Users find it helpful for improving teamwork and communication among employees.
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Many users recommend IBM Connections for its features such as email, calendars, meeting rooms, and document sharing. It is considered suitable for companies with multiple departments that require transparency in operations.
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Users suggest having IT staff who can handle the layout and functionality of IBM Connections to maximize its potential. They also recommend it for environments that support self-service and where end users want a well-structured content storage interaction.
Overall, IBM Connections is deemed valuable in strengthening internal social networks, improving collaboration, and providing efficient communication within organizations. It is particularly recommended for larger companies looking to save time with social and collaboration-based solutions, but can also benefit businesses of all sizes that aim to enhance their productivity and foster connectivity among employees.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-3 of 3)Not flashy, but it gets the job done
- The plugin for MS Office/Explorer has made saving and sharing working documents extremely convenient for me and my close colleagues
- The newsfeed feature conveniently aggregates updates from the communities/people you follow. It's nice not to have to jump from community to community to see what's going on in the organization
- The various apps can be used for several purposes. A little creativity goes a long way when establishing what type of information the apps can be useful for communicating
- Navigating Connections is tedious and time-consuming. More times than not I find it easier to simply search for what I'm looking for rather than trying to find what I need through other means
- While file uploading and sharing files is useful enough, the browser lacks the seamless nature of Google Docs and the plugin can't hold a candle to Sharepoint. It works, but I find it clunky
- We sorely miss our one-stop homepage (The Hub) that has been replaced by IBM Connections. There is no "jump-off" page to provide ease of navigation. It would really nice to be able to provide bookmarks and/or some form of directory in the side tabs of the newsfeed.
Ex) The status feature is essentially useless without following the person posting the status. We do not follow individual staff members because it leads to a cluttered newsfeed with information irrelevant to other departments. We still use our phone chat client to communicate statuses.
- I can't speak to monetary ROI, but it is an effective tool for communicating and has stimulated more open communication about special projects
- The cloud integration with email and profile boosts the appeal and usefulness of using the web-based browser (rather than Notes) -- however, I am not sold on Verse and dread the day everything gets moved over to that platform
- Though there's much to be desired, the wiki feature has allowed us to slowly phase out outdated resources
- Uploading and sharing documents, with the added feature of collaborative functions
- Communities specifically for shorter term projects to better communicate and store the information that may otherwise be lost in the shared drive down the line
- Communicating notices or announcements to all staff in a central location
- I did not expect to be able to upload and sync files from explorer or MS office. It is more convenient than the web browser and provides all the metadata available in the browser.
- Using the activities feature to track agendas and minutes is nice for storing meeting notes.
- I like that my manager can be updated on our progress without having to send her a notice or email. We already communicate several times on a daily basis, so it's convenient that we can cut out some unneeded correspondence from time to time.
- It would be great to be able to integrate our time-off schedule with Connections. We currently use a spreadsheet because we have leadership who are very particular about how the information is presented.
- We plan to integrate our phone and chat tech with Connections, but I'm not sure where that initiative stands at the moment.
- While we already use the wiki for policy information, an improved method of structuring the information would go a long way in making the wiki a functional standard operations manual. At this time, there is much to be desired on that front.
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Existing Relationship with the Vendor
IBM Connections on-premises: Excellent, but SMBs may want to look at the cloud version instead.
- The web UI is very easy for most users to get around. The mobile app UI is even better, especially for Blogs and Files. It’s clear IBM has done a lot of work around the usability of Connections. Most users immediately felt at home regardless of which social network(s) they’ve used. Technically savvy users quickly discovered how to customize a Community for their own purposes. After the initial introduction, most users could use the Connections web UI and mobile app easily without IT intervention.
- Ideation Blogs are a great way to brainstorm and share ideas, then vote on those ideas. The concept is great, and hopefully as time goes on IBM refines it with additional administrative control.
- Early test groups loved the mobile app immediately with its super easy file sync capabilities and associated document editing app (even though we did not have IBM Docs).
- Profiles were a big hit right away, making it easy to find, tag (recommend), and follow other people that might not otherwise be connected with in the organization.
- The ability to Tag, #hashtag and Follow virtually anything in Connections provides users easy ways to connect with people and content.
- External collaboration, even though we never specifically tested this, appears to be very clear in Connections, providing customers etc. a secure way to share information with internal teams.
- Search functionality is very good.
- The lack of a note-taking tool became a bigger and bigger issue as time went on. Our pilot users felt Connections was a natural place to take and share meeting notes – including photos, drawings, recorded audio, etc. – and were always frustrated that there was no easy, organized way to do that. We tried using a Blog, Wiki, etc. but nothing really resonated as a good solution for this.
- The Wiki tool is weak, providing rigid structure but with few options. A Community can only have a single Wiki, for instance. Wikis are weak in the mobile app as well; they’re not even easy to navigate. Users ended up ignoring Wikis completely despite our efforts to get them to convert documents like guidelines, policies, procedures, handbooks, etc. into Wiki form.
- The Windows Explorer plug-in was useful but required a lot of manual intervention to setup. For instance, once a user joins a Community in Connections, the Community also has to be manually added to the Explorer plug-in so the user can find, open and edit files with it. We felt this process should be much more automated.
- Tagging is only relevant in the web UI and, to a lesser extent, in the mobile app. However, in the Windows Explorer plug-in, Tags are not usable at all making it difficult to find things that were easy to find in the web UI.
- IBM Docs was not included in the on-premises deployment; it was an additional license so we did not test it. Documents, mainly Microsoft Office files, are still the single most common way our user community creates, shares, edits and presents information. That proved to be a major gap for our users, and slowed user adoption considerably. We considered testing it, but IBM Docs would only work for about half of our users so we found ourselves wondering if we really wanted to support two document editing platforms. IBM Docs also offers no way to work offline as far as we could tell. This also meant we would need to keep licensing Microsoft Office which is not cheap.
- Consulting costs are high because the back-end environment is complex. Installing, administrating and even patching Connections is a fairly complex process. We needed to hire consultants to install our test environment and any major upgrades would’ve required additional consulting fees. Any 3rd party add-ons we looked at were highly technical in nature meaning…you guessed it, more consulting costs.
- Administrating IBM Connections requires editing XML files in a specific, secure way that is typically done in a console. I love consoles as much as the next admin, but when you only use a console once every 2 months it means looking up all the documentation and re-educating yourself. A single change could take me 2 hours to implement. 3rd party admin dashboards do exist, at an additional cost, but IBM really should provide a much easier way to manage the environment.
- The lack of in-person or online training courses, materials, videos, etc. really discouraged a lot of users. The only decent training we could find (marketing videos aside) was a single video series on Lynda.com which, of course, was an additional cost. In the end that video didn’t really help our users much beyond introductory concepts.
- IBM includes reporting, but it’s a massive Cognos system requiring some serious hardware and Cognos expertise. We had neither, and would have ultimately opted for a 3rd party add-on for reporting and statistics.
- An often overlooked concern is eDiscovery. Our contracted eDiscovery service extensively works with various ECMs, but had no idea how they would handle Connections data. The cloud version of Connections offers an add-on for eDiscovery, but as far as we could tell IBM offered nothing for on-premises deployments.
If you work in a large company with lots of IT resources experienced with IBM tech such as WebSphere, DB2, etc., then I’d change the recommendation to an 8 for IBM Connections on-premises. Users really loved working in IBM Connections despite various gaps they found, and it seems that IBM is very responsive to customer feedback. Many new features in the last few releases were first suggested by customers.
Similarly, if you work in an SMB and are looking at IBM Connections online (or SmartCloud or whatever IBM calls it these days), then I’d probably also say 8 assuming the cloud version is at least as good as the on-premises version. My guess is that the cloud version is probably better, given IBM’s cloud-first strategy, and don’t forget that the cloud version includes IBM Docs.
If, however, you are in an SMB with a budget-constrained IT staff who are mostly familiar with Microsoft and who find it difficult to work with anything non-Microsoft, then IBM Connections on-premises is probably not going to work well in your organization. I’d score it a 4 in that case. Even if it works well for end-users today, as time goes on it seems users discover more gaps with the software. IBM is not quick to put out new versions of their on-premises software, either. The primary reasons I think on-premises is a tough sell in this scenario are the high cost of consulting (which has a side effect of further delaying the introduction of new features), the lack of an office document editor built-in, and the lack of training for both IT and end-users alike.
- IBM Connections 5.0 on-premises provided our pilot groups with better overall communications. Communities sprang up around projects, teams, departments, and even topics like new technologies. As the groups expanded their usage, they found posting Status updates, new or updated Files, and so forth really helped everyone keep up.
- Throughout our pilot we kept noticing that despite the availability of tools like Blogs, Wikis, etc., our users tended to primarily use Microsoft Office documents instead. Even "millennials" coming in expected full, native support to view and edit Microsoft Office files from the web UI. IBM Docs appears to be a suitable replacement but adds cost to the solution overall.
- Most of the admins, developers and technical support staff at our organization are heavily Microsoft-centric and find IBM software difficult to integrate, support and find training for.
- The Connections on-premises server environment is a complex one, requiring either extensive in-house skill with IBM technologies or costly consulting. SMBs should look to the cloud version instead.
We have not yet evaluated any particular products in depth; we had fully expected to move forward with Connections on-premises.
However, we have briefly looked at SmartCloud / Connections Cloud which is, of course, very similar but maintained and updated by IBM. We have also briefly looked into Office 365 which has several advantages, being (A) Microsoft Office, (B) broadly available training (live, video, etc.) and (C) enthusiastic support from most of IT and many end users. However, Office 365 is much more expensive.
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Product Reputation
- Prior Experience with the Product
- Analyst Reports
- Third-party Reviews
- Status Updates are brilliant. Always 1 or 2 clicks away.
- Profiles are really great, especially when you need to find or contact someone from the mobile app.
- File sync is super easy, and on the mobile app that's a really big thing to get right.
- Customizing Communities is pretty straightforward and IBM provides a fair amount of customization to help each Community.
- Consuming blog posts on the mobile app is a really immersive experience.
- Customizing notifications for end-users is really nice -- but it had to be enabled on the back-end (by modifying some XML file).
- Ideation Blogs are extremely helpful and easy to use.
- User adoption went very well thanks to IBM's clever implementations of common social concepts such as Liking, Following, Tags, #hashtags, and so forth.
- Wikis are weak. We wanted to see more control, more security, more presentation options, more structuring options, etc. Many wiki solutions offer a lot more flexibility. Even in the mobile app, wikis were not easy to navigate and cannot be edited.
- Working with Microsoft Office files from the web UI was a download-edit-upload process. Users were not willing to do that.
- The Windows Explorer plug-in is not as intuitive as it should be. Communities are not automatically added and Tags are not readily exposed.
- Activities are valuable but quickly get messy. A Kanban-style 3rd party implementation is much cleaner but of course costs extra.
- Software patches on the back-end are cumbersome, time consuming and the process is not entirely clear.
Scaling UP is never an issue with IBM's core technologies like WebSphere, DB2, etc. as long as you have or can find the technical resources to implement it.
Where IBM seems to fail is scaling DOWN for smaller organizations. Connections 5.0 on-premises would have required us to create 7 servers -- yes, they would be virtualized, but still that's 7 OS licenses, 40 virtual CPU cores, 80GB RAM, and a few TB of hard disk space. All to replace Quick which runs on 1 server with 1 OS license, 4 cores, 8GB RAM and 600GB of disk. Granted, there are major differences in capabilities between the two, but how do you get a CFO understand why features like a mobile app, file sync, and social sharing require 10x the back-end resources?
IBM Connections review
- The Mobile consummation of IBM Connections is very good and is rapidly improving over time. Every month a new version of the Mobile app for IBM Connections is being delivered which fixes bugs but also adds new functionality over time.
- Stability is very high of the product as it runs on IBM WebSphere (which has proved itself already in the MidMarket segment completely) and is very important for us as a customer because this keeps the day to day management costs for the environment very low.
- The open design of the product. It's fairly easy to extend the product but also the end user working and feeling is open. What I mean by that is that the product supports self serviceability so no costs at the IT department regarding of creating FileShares and so on.
- Out of the box IBM Connections delivers a complete solution which can be used as a base to extend on. Connections to already existing LDAP/SAP/Domiono or other HR systems can easily be build via the delivered license of IBM Security Directory Integrator product with IBM Connections which is almost limitless in connecting different resources together.
- The UI of the activities component really needs a redesign. Currently this component was there already from the beginning of IBM Connections and never got a UI overhaul. Currently the functionality is working exceptionally good but the UI is too much based on Text instead of a graphical UI.
- Better integration with PIM (Personal Information Manager like (domino and/or exchange)) environments.
- Currently for the admin side of IBM Connections a lot is done on the command line. It would be a improvement if we get a special designed ADMIN UI. Where 95% of the management of the product can be handled.
- On the customer service part - one of the positive sides of IBM Connections is the openness. Thanks to that openness people started to help each other when they posted problems regarding company issues instead and they followed the officially designed business processes. In the end this made our company much more cost effective.
- Because of the mobility functionality of IBM Connections we really saw a big jump in the employee efficiency corner. They could access their documents faster and wherever they where around the globe.
- Better collaboration of business users of different departments
- 24/7 availability of content and knowledge
- Mobility support from IBM
- Self serviceability of end users (business users).
- Much more helpful to each other if they see from each other they struggle with the same day to day problems.
- Content/ Documents are reused more instead of reinvented now that people can find their content.
- Extend the reach of the platform to other platforms to get that UI/content inside connections as well.
- Get a more steering management layer within the organization than a leading management (which is currently the situation within the organization)
- Connect the current business process more and more to this collaboration platform.
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Product Reputation
- Vendor Reputation
- Existing Relationship with the Vendor
- Analyst Reports
- Implemented in-house
- Professional services company
- Deciding how the environment had to be called within the organization.
- Lack of knowledge within the company about the product (in the end this was covered by hiring external people) to keep the project going.
- Network infrastructre wasn't prepared on how we wanted to adapt the network infrastructure to our needs.
- In-person training
- The homepage functionality is very elegant to use.
- Creating of communities and their functions is very easy to do.
- Connections the Mobile client is straight forward.
- The rich text editor of IBM Connections could get some improvements of copy/paste actions.
- Getting an insight within the platform on the items you do follow and the items yo do not follow is quite cumbersome.