HCL Connections vs. Microsoft Yammer

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
HCL Connections
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
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.N/A
Microsoft Yammer
Score 7.1 out of 10
N/A
Yammer is used for private communication within organizations or between organizational members and pre-designated groups, making it an example of enterprise social software. It originally launched as an enterprise microblogging service and now has applications on several different operating systems and devices. The company was acquired by Microsoft in 2012.N/A
Pricing
HCL ConnectionsMicrosoft Yammer
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
HCL ConnectionsMicrosoft Yammer
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
HCL ConnectionsMicrosoft Yammer
Considered Both Products
HCL Connections
Chose HCL Connections
IBM Connections offers a complete package of tools that can be useful but it doesn't integrate well with other services. Competitors like Yammer offer slightly fewer features but are cheaper and much easier to maintain. If we were making a decision today we probably would …
Chose HCL Connections
Better integration points with third party products, most functionality is part of the core product.
Microsoft Yammer
Chose Microsoft Yammer
Yammer created very important and reliable social network across the whole company. We used to have MS SharePoint, but since Yammer became available via Office 365 we moved to Yammer.

IBM Connections is difficult to maintain + costs are higher.
Chose Microsoft Yammer
IBM Connections has a more mature set of features however it is expensive and difficult to maintain. Traditionally IBM Connections require an on-premise installation which required a large capital investment and an ongoing level of expertise to maintain. Although now IBM offers …
Chose Microsoft Yammer
blueKiwi : yammer does well in terms of user experience, initial ram, up, but less so in total feature set
Jive: since Yammer is SaaS, some customers will be unable to use yammer
Sharepoint: although not a direct competitor, Microsofts own solution has some overlap on Yammer as …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
HCL ConnectionsMicrosoft Yammer
Project Management
Comparison of Project Management features of Product A and Product B
HCL Connections
-
Ratings
Microsoft Yammer
7.8
40 Ratings
1% below category average
Task Management00 Ratings8.024 Ratings
Gantt Charts00 Ratings8.012 Ratings
Scheduling00 Ratings8.218 Ratings
Workflow Automation00 Ratings8.020 Ratings
Mobile Access00 Ratings7.238 Ratings
Search00 Ratings7.338 Ratings
Visual planning tools00 Ratings8.022 Ratings
Communication
Comparison of Communication features of Product A and Product B
HCL Connections
-
Ratings
Microsoft Yammer
7.8
43 Ratings
3% below category average
Chat00 Ratings8.539 Ratings
Notifications00 Ratings8.343 Ratings
Discussions00 Ratings9.042 Ratings
Surveys00 Ratings7.033 Ratings
Internal knowledgebase00 Ratings7.632 Ratings
Integrates with GoToMeeting00 Ratings7.414 Ratings
Integrates with Gmail and Google Hangouts00 Ratings6.613 Ratings
Integrates with Outlook00 Ratings8.332 Ratings
File Sharing & Management
Comparison of File Sharing & Management features of Product A and Product B
HCL Connections
-
Ratings
Microsoft Yammer
8.4
36 Ratings
3% above category average
Versioning00 Ratings7.025 Ratings
Video files00 Ratings8.631 Ratings
Audio files00 Ratings9.029 Ratings
Document collaboration00 Ratings8.730 Ratings
Access control00 Ratings8.030 Ratings
Advanced security features00 Ratings8.627 Ratings
Integrates with Google Drive00 Ratings8.014 Ratings
Device sync00 Ratings9.023 Ratings
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HCL ConnectionsMicrosoft Yammer
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HCL Connections
HCL Connections
Score 8.7 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
HCL ConnectionsMicrosoft Yammer
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(20 ratings)
7.8
(53 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
7.7
(7 ratings)
6.9
(10 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(4 ratings)
9.0
(3 ratings)
Availability
10.0
(1 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Performance
9.0
(1 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
8.0
(4 ratings)
7.0
(12 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(2 ratings)
Implementation Rating
7.3
(1 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
7.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
HCL ConnectionsMicrosoft Yammer
Likelihood to Recommend
HCL Technologies
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.
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Microsoft
Yammer is great when you have a company culture that encourages friendly collaboration and communication. It can be a great supplement (but certainly not a substitute) for bonding and sharing ideas and thoughts. Certain channels can be really successful, too, like a channel where people can post dog pictures or something fun like that!
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Pros
HCL Technologies
  • 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
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Microsoft
  • Providing a platform for social news in the company where "bottom up" topics can percolate freely across department
  • Social networking across the company where folks can divide their work into topics instead of teams
  • Basic collaboration within a group including document sharing with ability to pin documents to a team
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Cons
HCL Technologies
  • 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.
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Microsoft
  • Although the social enterprise network works very well, there is room for some slight improvement - such as the ability to attract users. By being part of the Microsoft Office Suite, it is offered as an "add-on" and many overlook it and see it as unnecessary at first. It would be smart for Microsoft to sell it as its own product so it could gather more popularity as a "social network".
  • Giving an option to filter results could be better as well as giving an option to turn off the "recent activity" bar on the home page.
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Likelihood to Renew
HCL Technologies
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.
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Microsoft
Microsoft is dedicated to continual improvement on Yammer. They realize the value that Yammer brings to the table with their clients. In the short time that we have had Yammer implemented, we are just now beginning to see the strong impact it has on becoming more effective and efficient around collaboration.
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Usability
HCL Technologies
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.
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Microsoft
Overall easy to use and intuitive, although limited in the possibility to personalize layout and look & feel of a site. Some functionalities are not easy to use, like document editing, but some others are quick and effective (posts and tagging above all). Performance and responsiveness of the Yammer site is typically acceptable, in my experience.
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Reliability and Availability
HCL Technologies
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.
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Microsoft
Very available
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Performance
HCL Technologies
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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Microsoft
It's a simple product but it does provide value.
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Support Rating
HCL Technologies
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.
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Microsoft
We have never had to use the support for Yammer. The tool works well and we have not come across any bugs. User Interface is simple and easy to use, similar to other forum type products, thereby removing the need for any extensive training. Team members are invited in and immediately are able to start using the tool.
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Online Training
HCL Technologies
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
The training that Microsoft provides is very generic training for Yammer. I like the fact the training is short and easy to understand
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Implementation Rating
HCL Technologies
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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Microsoft
We organically implemented the product
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Alternatives Considered
HCL Technologies
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.
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Microsoft
Our team briefly used Salesforce.com's Chatter product before switching over to Yammer in 2012. While Chatter is essentially the same product as Yammer, it left much to be desired. Chatter's design was (and remains) clunky and difficult to navigate. Yammer is a simple, easy-to-use product that offers similar functionality as Salesforce's Chatter.
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Scalability
HCL Technologies
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?
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Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
HCL Technologies
  • 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.
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Microsoft
  • My company is pleased with the positive impact Yammer has created departmentally and on an individual basis with work flow efficiency.
  • Adversely, most old and new employees are more familiar with SharePoint, causing the company to pay for training for all current and incoming employees.
  • As Yammer becomes more widely used, the need for training may diminish, which is where we will see our return on investment, as the product clearly provides a more effective form of file sharing and communication between employees and their department.
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ScreenShots