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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Insightly
Score7.8 out of 10
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Insightly is presented as a modern, affordable CRM that is easy to use, simple to customize, and that scales with companies as they grow, designed to solve common pain points that legacy CRMs can't. Available in any vertical, Insightly CRM customers can add companion products for marketing automation, customer service, and integrations in the same platform. Insightly has more than a million users worldwide.
IBM Connections is well suited for larger organizations that need an internal social networking tool and are willing to deal with IBM and the complexity of the software. It is less appropriate for smaller organizations and those who don't want to deal with the complexity, or IBM's awful customer service and prices.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
There are a lot of things Insightly is great with for Career Services but much of my job is updating things manually because Insightly doesn't have a way to help me manage the database the way we need to. We have multiple academic records per students but needed to have fields that are multiselect on our contacts. These are all manually updated which are very tedious and not the best for what we need it to be able to do
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Once you are immersed in the platform, for all of its integration kudos, the platform became "intuitive" if that is the right word for it. There was some push back from staff on deployment.
The service and support team at Insightly was very responsive, but it seemed as if they had fielded similar complaints, and slower learning curves than we expected.
Unfortunately, while all has worked out nicely now and we are very happy with the platform, we had to have additional instruction time for all the staff during onboarding as workflows, dashboards, and pipelines were more time intensive than expected on the demo.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
Connections has continued to more than meet our needs from a collaboration point of view and we are currently working on integration with our IBM Websphere portal platform to provide an integrated collaboration solution. This scenario will provide our users the best both products have to offer in a single interface.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Insightly offers a great product; it's the right fit for our company at this time. We were, however, considering moving to Contactually due to their cost effective automation features. However, they lacked the project management capabilities of Insightly. As our company grows, we would love to stay with Insightly - and if they can nail the automation and add the ability to customize a little bit more, it would be the perfect solution for us. For a larger company with a more involved sales team, you might find the metrics/reporting to be a bit basic. Insightly offers great customer service even to free customers
Connections combines all the most useful abilities from various social networks. This makes it useful of course, but it also reduces user adoption time initially by allowing users to get comfortable with basic features. Once they are comfortable, it's easy for users to start exploring. They find new people in the organization to contact, new sources of information, etc. Before you know it, about half of the users are contributing back in some form -- and all with little or no training needed by IT.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Anyone with any experience with a working knowledge of Facebook or using a Windows computer will be able to quickly adapt to Insightly and use it to suit their needs. It can become more difficult to use as a company might have custom workflows or Insightly customer service might need to customize the program to better suit a company's need. A slow introduction to the system is better than having to learn the program quickly. Parts and knowledge build on each other so it hard to grasp all at once. The learning curve for Insightly is 2-3 weeks while mastery comes with time and exposure to the program
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
Once Connections was installed, patched, etc. it was ALWAYS up. We only had to bring it down for OS updates to the servers. That seems to be typical of anything that runs on WebSphere; it's bulletproof and could probably run for months and years if the underlying OS didn't require constant patching.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
The provider is 100% available, with no downtime, maintenance, or unexpected outages. We have been able to perform solid continuous services for 12 months without any interruptions. We have backups as well, unlike the in-house backup that they keep on their end. I believe they have a very good redundancy and backup infrastructure in case they get any outages.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
IBM Connections web UI, mobile app (data sync to / from the device), and file transfer speeds were almost always very fast. It was rare for a slow-down of any kind, even when doing searches.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Pages normally load quickly, but every now and then, as entering updates to fields, it take a while to update. Sometimes even after refreshing the screen, we have to exit and go back in to get the fields or queries to update.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
IBM Support has ALWAYS been quick to respond, regardless of the product. Even first level techs seldom provide "canned" responses and they really try to help. If they can't help, they don't wallow around but engage the right person immediately. It's very rare that the first level tech needs to escalate, and even more rare when they do escalate and the next person engaged cannot solve it. We have been more than satisfied with IBM support's quick and professional responses to our issues.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
We have used Insightly for almost 2 years now. We have always been able to get in touch with support for a variety of reasons and they have never disappointed us. The support staff have always been very understanding. They have assisted with answers to our questions and have provided great tech support. We would highly recommend them.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Well, we didn’t get the chance to do this in-person training but rather one-on-one online training with HR in-house. There were PowerPoints to discuss as well as video instructions on how to use the app, so it was okay. We were able to play around with it during the training or onboarding session.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
I've used Insightly's online training &/ or learned as I went. I've found the blogs and online written material helpful. I've also attended a few webinars, which can be useful if you use a J-I-T approach so as not to overwhelm you (or your staff) with functionality that you are using just yet. The fact that it's all available on their website and you can learn at your own pace is invaluable
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
Try to understand you will never find a product which suites all your end user for 100%. IBM Connections is the best of all breeds but if you go look on each functionality on its own there are better example out there. But as IBM COnnections delivers it all in just one platform makes it the best example about integration of different functionality into one platform.
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A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
From the few times that I have used MS SharePoint, I can say that it doesn't seem to hold a candle to the robust features of IBM Connections. The out-of-the-box capabilities of IBM Connections are amazing and are more easy to access and use than what I've seen with MS SharePoint.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Insightly is significantly better than Zendesk. It is easy to use, pleasant to look at, and makes sense. However, I don't think Insightly is fair now compared to Salesforce. Insightly can do many of the same things as Salesforce, but I've only started on some of these features. Insightly has excellent potential, and its support team drives me to make it what I believe it can be. For the price, I believe Insightly is worth it.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
I don’t have the exact answers for this, but our accounting or finance department negotiates this. They always handle this kind of stuff and negotiate yearly licenses. Usually, they purchase 10 licenses in bulk and ask for a discount in bulk. Other than that, if there are any issues encountered on the app, they account for that. If it’s broken, that’s also taken into consideration when renewing the contract.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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?
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
(+) Being able to download my LinkedIn connections was a huge benefit. (+) I use the task function to stay on top of my follow-up activity which is another positive feature. (+) The sorting capabilities also help me pinpoint the contacts that I need to stay on top of. (-) When I add a new lead from an existing organization, I would like the organization's information to automatically populate the fields like address, website, description. I enter all that information manually. (-) My mass mailing experience has been tedious due to the email function being interrupted and crashing due to bad email addresses in some of my records. (-) Many of my leads do not have current email addresses. I wish Insightly offered a tool to help find email addresses. I spend too much time researching to find email addresses.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Positive Impact>Visibility is critical when it comes to taking proactive measures within the organization. The Insightly Tool has helped use with that which minimizes costs when it comes to rework. We can proactively plan for upcoming growth and identify areas of improvement.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
