HCL Connections vs. LumApps vs. Simpplr

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.

Incentivized

Suited for- It's a great one start shop for information. If you want your data all in one place and easy to access, you cannot beat LumApps for this. It's ease of placing pages across multiple sectors, menu navigation, and org chart integration are lovely. It showcases information and files very well with easy web page design that brings it all together. With only a little bit of training many people can use the product and create content. Less Appropriate- While great at what it does it is still a place to showcase information, not house it. It's not a replacement for Microsoft or Google regarding online file storage. It does not do the storage. It just makes files easy to access if your company houses them already. This same idea applies to Active Directory, it can do a lot of great customization of roles and allow/highlight information for people if they already have great data about people. It is a challenge if the backend data profiles of a person are not already syncing from other systems.

It's well suited as a central point for your company. It can easily be branded for your every need and showcase everything that's going on for your users. The mobile app is excellent and gives the full package on your mobile device so that you're always in tune with what's going on at your workplace. There are loads of shoutouts and constant uploads of team photos and excursions. We work for a really active company, so there are always loads getting posted on a day-to-day basis. It breaks up the monotony of staring at a spreadsheet when you see your colleagues having fun while working.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Offers simple addition of custom content types that give the ability to apply different access and distribution levels.
• The HTML widget allows for the simple removal of WYSIWG tools to simplify the view for content contributors.
• The ability to rearrange layouts is very simple.

Incentivized

• It's a great document library for everything to timesheets through to expenses
• Great friendly fresh feel to the interface
• User information is easily synced with AD/AAD and other sources
• Great 'People' section where staff can get to know their colleagues
• Great 'Apps' section where you can add links for all the sites our users need access to

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• The editing user interface is a bit wonky and occasionally glitchy.
• The back-end options are not organized super well, which can make it confusing to find the right settings.
• The customization options are somewhat limited without advanced CSS/dev skills, and the basic functions can be a bit challenging for some non-technical users.

Incentivized

• I don't like the name. It's actually not simpler to spell Simpplr. Nice product, daft name.
• I'd like to see the people section stand out more and have a bolder collaboration side to it. It would be awesome to collaborate on documents together via a screen share facility.
• Video calling directly via Simpplr would be awesome.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The tool is easy to use. Even without a dedicated product owner we feel confident using the system for our needs.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

If you are a content owner, you need to learn how to use the tools and this can be time-consuming and not simple. We rely on the support of our internal LumApps team to provide support and train us on the tools. But it is fairly convenient once you know how to use it correctly.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

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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.

Incentivized

Question and bug support are very helpful and quick. About the feature requests, we don’t have much visibility of the features that we suggested, or If they are going to implement some solutions or not.

Incentivized

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.

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.

Incentivized

Our organization selected LumApps for its customizability, integrations with the Google suite, Slack, etc., in addition to the customizable meta-data that would allow for a unique user experience for our global teams so that users in the Latin American region, for example, would no longer be inundated with content that did not apply to their region or market.

Simpplr seemed to have the most modern approach when describing what they want to achieve for the company. It integrates with all the platforms that we use and ticked all of the boxes we were looking for in a modern intranet package. It is significantly more modern and easier to manage than our old Intranet. Our comms team loves it, and feedback has been great from everyone in the company. It's hard to find any negatives about it.

Incentivized

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?

Incentivized

• Positive - Using IBM Connections has reduced the number of directories and file share repositories previously used for collaboration.
• Positive - The direction is to stop relying on email for the only method of communicating and sharing knowledge. IBM Connections is in the right step.

Incentivized

• after migration, it has reduced time for Internal Comms to create and publish content (for some content that we can import as a chart, like anniversary celebrations, we've been able to reduce the time from 4-6 hours down to about 15 minutes)
• we haven't used long it enough to see ROI on other facets, but not having divisions create their own websites unbeknownst to anyone else is invaluable

Incentivized

• It's modernized our intranet and staff outlook
• Made it easier to communicate objectives with staff
• Allowed us to show focus on events that are coming up and really showcase them
• Internal news items are always great, and we have weekly updates from our Exec Team

Incentivized